Peace, justice and care for the environment. A message for the world.

 

AP Photo/Gregoria Borgia

It’s certainly one everyone can grab onto, and Pope Benedict is getting plenty of attention for saying what he did Thursday in Australia, his first day to address the throngs pouring in to celebrate World Youth Day.

The world’s natural resources are being squandered in the pursuit of “insatiable consumption,” Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday in a speech urging followers to care more for the environment and reconnect with the principle of peace.

Benedict, speaking to more than 200,000 pilgrims gathered for the Roman Catholic church’s youth festival, expanded on a theme that has led him to be dubbed “the green pope.”

His message is a warning about all the toxic dangers.

Types of “poison” are afflicting the world’s social environment, he said, such as substance abuse, along with the exaltation of violence and sexual degradation, for which he blamed television and the Internet.

“The concerns for nonviolence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity,” Benedict told the crowd.

The media like the emphasis on social justice. But some of them get the fuller message.

He also declared faith’s central position in the moral universe, attacking the idea that there are no absolute truths.

“Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made ‘experience’ all-important,” he said. “Yet experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead not to genuine freedom but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect.”

He was there to help restore it.

Faced with this reality, the Holy Father recalled that in man “the apex of God’s creation,” is also impacted. With numerous advances in medicine, technology, and the arts, “the quality and enjoyment of people’s lives in many ways are steadily rising.”

In addition, Benedict XVI stressed that “All of us, young and old, have those moments when the innate goodness of the human person – perhaps glimpsed in the gesture of a little child or an adult’s readiness to forgive – fills us with profound joy and gratitude.”

This is part of the call for peace, justice and care for creation, as Benedict reminds all listeners. So if the media want to run with the ‘environmental pope’ story, they shouldn’t separate it from what he means by protecting creation.

The Holy Father concluded his talk stressing the point that “God’s creation is one and it is good.  The concerns for non-violence, sustainable development, justice and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity. They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to natural death: a dignity conferred by God himself and thus inviolable.”