Church Teaching on Our Responsibility to Care for the Environment: Part II

In last week’s bulletin an article I introduced the need to care for the environment from a Catholic Church Teaching perspective. This week’s column is the second part of that article. 

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has published a document entitled, “Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching.” This document that can be read here and is worth reading in its entirety. In this regard several sections speak of the need to be good stewards of God’s resources:

• Catholic Church teaching is to protect life and find effective ways to prevent conflicts and resolve them by peaceful means. Conflicts do exist in the world today on the use of resources and/or their lack of availability for everyone.

•  People have a right and a duty to participate in society, seeking together the common good (common good being understood to be the sum total of social conditions which allow people, as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully). The common good concerns the life of all. It calls for prudence from each. 

• Each person has a fundamental right to life and those things required for human decency. These rights are duties and responsibilities to one another, our families and the larger society. We each have this duty (and in the context of this article for the duty to protect the environment).



• We are one human family and are our brother’s and sisters’ keepers.

•  We show our respect for the Creator by our stewardship of creation. Care for Earth is not just an Earth Day slogan. We are called to protect the planet, living our faith in relationship with all of God’s creation. This environmental challenge has fundamental moral and ethical dimensions that cannot be ignored.

By Deacon Tom Gryzbek