Ecological conversion: the challenge of our times

by Peter Knox SJ

Christian churches around the world celebrate September 1st as a day of prayer for creation. We acknowledge God as our creator. In South Africa, 1st September is “Spring Day.” We see and smell the wisteria, the clivias, the jasmine. The bees are already gathering nectar, already pollinating. We praise God for the wonders and the beauty in all that we see around us. We repent for our heavy footprint, wanting to be lighter, gentler, and more humble on the earth. The theme for the 2025 Season of Creation is “to make peace with creation”. 

We are very comfortable when we hear words about the Christian virtue of humility. Humility is NOT about a false modesty: “I am worthless in God’s eyes.” That false humility doesn’t acknowledge the good that God has invested in each one of us. We have dignity and a mind of our own. The Church’s social teaching starts with the equal dignity of all people. No one is more important or more worthy of respect than anyone else, no matter their gender, age, achievements, wealth, race, education, or status in society. 

To think that we are more important is a distorted, misguided and excessive sense of our own value in creation. It is a modern idea. Our ancestors once lived in harmony with nature. Do we try to do that any more? If we regard ourselves as the top of the food chain, with everything else subservient to our needs, we might as well tear out the natural grassland and all the animals that belong there. We should then divert and dam rivers, spray chemicals to improve the plant yields, build cities where there is no water, burn fossil fuels that raise the temperature of the earth, cover our garden with paving, throw away things we no longer need, mine deep and on the surface in our quest for more and more minerals, leave scars on the landscape that will never heal, and displace people from their ancestral lands. All of these are crimes against the planet, and Patriarch Bartholomew calls them sins. 

There’s a thought: Harming nature is sinful. The cars we drive, the way we heat our homes, our food choices and cooking methods. The list is extensive and has significant environmental implications, potentially causing harm. Do I make serious efforts to reduce the damage? What kind of world am I leaving for the generations to come? How much will they suffer from my carelessness? 

Pope Francis wrote that the whole community of life is not designed around me or you. God made the world for its own sake, to reflect the wonder of God. Not just so that one species should dominate and conquer and strip everything else. Francis called that tyrannical anthropocentrism, and the Bible has no place for it. 

Francis called on us to convert: to change our behaviour, our attitude, and our spirituality towards the natural, created world. Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis both urged us to have an ecological conversion. This is the challenge of our times. Francis said that we must think of the world as though it were another person, like our Mother Earth. We cannot continue to strip and extract from it whatever we think we need, for whatever the businesspeople tell us we can’t do without. We also need to bear in mind all the other animal and plant species that share our home. What is consumerism doing to them? Are they being squashed by our ever-increasing ecological footprint?