Dear Editor: My deepest thanks to Bishop DiMarzio for his “Put Out into the Deep” column on Pope Francis’s encyclical, “Laudato Si’, On Care For Our Common Home” (July 22). I was especially moved by the Bishop’s memories of how his own grandfather “Francesco” embodied one of the points Pope “Francesco” stresses in his encyclical, never wasting what God has given us, never colluding in today’s “throwaway” culture.
I am also grateful that Bishop DiMarzio calls us to study Laudato Si’ and provides a link to The Tablet’s online study guide. With Protestants, Jews, Muslims and other religious people around the world, not to mention atheists, Marxists and “nones,” reading and responding to the encyclical, it certainly seems fitting that we Catholics should do so as well!
My one concern about the bishop’s column is that he seems to suggest that the environment that causes “the most direct threat” to human beings is “the misunderstanding of contraception and population control.” Of course, Pope Francis does clearly state on several occasions in “Laudato si’” that abortion and lack of respect for life are part of the throwaway culture that threatens God’s creation.
But it would be a mistake to say that “Laudato si’” places abortion and contraception at the top of a hierarchy of sins against God’s creation. It is no coincidence that in his chapter on “integral ecology,” that is, on the inherent connection between all things, Pope Francis stresses the integral connection between environmental destruction and “the sexual exploitation of children and abandonment of the poor… buying the organs of the poor for resale, or eliminating children because they are not what their parents wanted. This same use and throw-away logic generates so much waste,” he tells us, “because of the disordered desire to consume more than what is really necessary.” (123)
Pope Francis affirms the Church’s teaching on the preciousness of unborn life. He also challenges us to realize that this precious life extends to all of God’s creation – the Earth we live on, the water we drink, the plants we eat and the air we breathe and that we must revere all of it.
MARIAN RONAN, PH.D.
Manhattan
Editor’s Note: Dr. Marian Ronan is a research professor of Catholic Studies at New York Theological Seminary.
When God saw that “it” was good “it” included everything emphasis on “everything”.
When Julian of Norwich wrote that “…all shall be well,and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well”
her “all manner of thing” included God’s “everything. There is nothing that is not sacred if we accept the interconnectedness of all that God created. The child in the womb needs the clean water of unpolluted streams and those streams need us to keep that child protected for its own sake and for the sake of the future of the earth on which (s)he will walk and the stream will flow.
Not for nothing did the Holy Father cite St Francis’ hymn; he could also have cited Native American writings and others too. The universal respect for creation is not a new doctrine discovered recently; it is as old as the Book of Genesis, and even older than that.
Dr.Ronan and Bishop DiMarzio are two sides of the same coin which can’t have only one side.