There have been a lot of comments in the past few days regarding the appropriateness of the leader of the Catholic church to express himself with regards to one of the biggest problems we are confronting, climate change.
Setting aside for the moment whether you trust the scientific evidence available or not, the fact is that this has made a lot of people very nervous. Why? A lot of people in positions of power only like to hear what they want to hear, not what hey need to hear.
But, that is indeed the role that the church should serve in society and when the church is at its best, when it is obeying the command to “pursue justice (Deuteronomy 16:20)”. Have they stumbled? Yes. But at least, for the moment the institution is doing the right thing and that deserves recognition, just as much as it deserves rebuke when it does the wrong things.
In my view, Francis is following in the steps of Moses, Nathan, Samuel, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Mordechai. Each and every one of them went against the powerful when the cause of justice demanded it. So to say that the Pope should only concern himself with one sphere and leave others to worry about climate change betrays a profound ignorance of what the Bible actually says.
The role of the prophet in the bible, is not as it is commonly believed to predict the future or to moralize. The role of the prophet is to make people think, to make people “examine their experiences and their actions with care, lest the deceitfulness of their own thoughts lead them into mistaking wrongdoing for justice.”(The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture pag.165).
Setting aside for the moment whether you trust the scientific evidence available or not, the fact is that this has made a lot of people very nervous. Why? A lot of people in positions of power only like to hear what they want to hear, not what hey need to hear.
But, that is indeed the role that the church should serve in society and when the church is at its best, when it is obeying the command to “pursue justice (Deuteronomy 16:20)”. Have they stumbled? Yes. But at least, for the moment the institution is doing the right thing and that deserves recognition, just as much as it deserves rebuke when it does the wrong things.
In my view, Francis is following in the steps of Moses, Nathan, Samuel, Daniel, Jeremiah, and Mordechai. Each and every one of them went against the powerful when the cause of justice demanded it. So to say that the Pope should only concern himself with one sphere and leave others to worry about climate change betrays a profound ignorance of what the Bible actually says.
The role of the prophet in the bible, is not as it is commonly believed to predict the future or to moralize. The role of the prophet is to make people think, to make people “examine their experiences and their actions with care, lest the deceitfulness of their own thoughts lead them into mistaking wrongdoing for justice.”(The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture pag.165).
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg