Reflection
Today is the beginning of Laudato Si Week. May 24, 2020 will be the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical on care for our common home. Laudato Si’ is an inspirational document which encourages us to reflect on the values we share and create a more just and sustainable future.
May 16-23 will be Laudato Si Week. Its theme is Everything Is Connected. During Laudato Si’ Week, we come together as one people around the world to prayerfully discern the lessons of this moment. While the world experiences a history-defining crisis, we reflect and prepare to build a better world. Laudato Si Week culminates with a world day of prayer on May 24.
Laudato Si’ has been welcomed as a document of deep and abiding beauty, and it has prompted people around the world to reflect more deeply on Creator and creation. Its vision of integral ecology, which sees connections between how we treat God, nature, and each other, offers simple but profound truths about the bonds that unite us.
Laudato Si Week 2020
Prayer
Laudato Si – Praise be to You!
Action
Read a copy of Laudato Si if you have not already done so. Look up some of the quotes and a summary on the internet. Go to the Laudato Si website and participate in an event or activity.(laudatosiweek.org/)
Suggested Reading
Quotes from Laudato Si
I urgently appeal . . . for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.
Disregard for the duty to cultivate and maintain a proper relationship with my neighbor, for whose care and custody I am responsible, ruins my relationship with my own self, with others, with God and with the earth. When all these relationships are neglected, when justice no longer dwells in the land, the Bible tells us that life itself is endangered.
A fragile world, entrusted by God to human care, challenges us to devise intelligent ways of directing, developing and limiting our power.
We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.
A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.
We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family.
An interdependent world not only makes us more conscious of the negative effects of certain lifestyles and models of production and consumption which affect us all; more importantly, it motivates us to ensure that solutions are proposed from a global perspective, and not simply to defend the interests of a few countries.
All Christian communities have an important role to play in ecological education. Local individuals and groups can make a real difference. They are able to instill a greater sense of responsibility, a strong sense of community, a readiness to protect others, a spirit of creativity and a deep love for the land.
The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.