MERCY TOWARDS CREATION
Pope Francis has suggested that care for the environment should be added to the Church’s traditional list of the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. The Pope called upon us to repent of the ecological damage they have caused and to make a “firm purpose of amendment” to act in concrete ways that are “more respectful of creation.”
Pope Francis issued his call to repentance in “Show Mercy to our Common Home,” his message for the 2016 World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. The Pope himself instituted that observance last year.
He said we usually think of the works of mercy individually and in relation to a specific initiative: hospitals for the sick, soup kitchens for the hungry, shelters for the homeless, schools for those to be educated, the confessional and spiritual direction for those needing counsel and forgiveness. However, when we look at the works of mercy as a whole, “we see that the object of mercy is human life itself and everything it embraces.
The Pope repeated his argument, made in Laudato Si‘, that climate change has a disproportionate impact on the poor and needy. He wrote that wealthy nations, which have profited from the exploitation of the environment, should now begin paying an “ecological debt” that they owe to poorer nations.
Cardinal Peter Turkson, the newly appointed head of the dicastery for Integral Human Development said, “Ecological conversion entails not only individual conversion, but community conversion too.”
