Of Pope Benedict's Message and Marinduque Crises

Watched the live feed on NBN of Pope Benedict's New Year's Mass, also marking the Catholic Church's 43rd World Peace Day. In his homily underlying the theme "If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation" the Pope urged people to adopt new lifestyles "marked by sobriety and solidarity with new rules and forms of engagement, one which focuses on strategies that actually work, while decisively rejecting those that have failed."

"If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation," the Pope said. "It is becoming more and more evident that the issue of environmental degradation challenges us to examine our lifestyle and the prevailing models of consumption and production.”

"Yet no less troubling are the threats arising from the neglect – if not downright misuse – of the Earth and the natural goods that God has given us", he added.

Humanity needed a profound cultural renewal, the Pope said. "Our present crises – be they economic, food-related, environmental or social – are ultimately also moral crises, and all of them are interrelated. They require us to rethink the path which we are travelling together."

The Pope also underlined what Pope John II in 1990 spoke of as an “environmental crisis”, an appeal all the more pressing today, “in the face of signs of a growing crisis which it would be irresponsible not to take seriously”, he said. “Can we remain indifferent before the problems associated with such realities as climate change, desertification, the deterioration and loss of productivity in vast agricultural areas, the pollution of rivers and aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the increase of natural catastrophes and the deforestation of equatorial and tropical regions?”

Marinduque Crises

“Solidarity”; “new rules and forms of engagement”; “focus on strategies that work; refection of those that have failed”; “environmental, social crises that are also moral crises”...”the need to rethink the path we are travelling together”.

With such words, the good Pope may well have fortuitously spoken of a certain small island in the tropics where such things are similarly spoken of but not heeded even by those who religiously utter them.

The Holy Father even touched on the power crisis. To be sure, among the problems that should be addressed, he said “is that of energy resources and the development of joint and sustainable strategies to satisfy energy needs... there is a need to encourage research into, and utilization of, forms of energy with lower impact on the environment.”

On such issues that have befallen the God-centered island of Marinduque, a member of the provincial council, board member Jose F. Alvarez, put it so succinctly when he, at the height of the energy crisis here, spoke of: “the need to address the more important crises of truth and justice, the current energy crisis merely symptomatic; the need to understand the cause of such crises, for individual freedom and responsibility to be attained, and for economic development (in Marinduque) to usher in.”

Video of Alvarez’ remarks in Tagalog to be posted.