On October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the annual ecumenical campaign ‘Time of Creation’ concludes; and until October 12, the Third Caravan for Integral Ecology is taking place. The Augustinian-Recollect Family joins in the love and care of our common home.
In the Letter to the Romans, the Earth is represented as a mother who groans as if she were giving birth (Rom 8:22). Francis of Assisi referred to the planet as our sister and our mother in his Canticle of Creatures. For the believer, the Earth must be a gift from the Creator, a mother who shelters and nourishes us, never a means to enrich oneself.
“To wait” in the biblical context is not to remain still and silent, but rather something active, firm and visible: groaning, crying out and struggling are part of waiting. Just like in childbirth, we go through a period of intense pain, but so that a new life can emerge.
It is in this “waiting” that the “hope” that allows us to overcome decay is framed, hope that is a protection and a safeguard against futility; hope that leads us to freedom and the responsibility of making the world a better place.
Climate change caused by the carbonization of the atmosphere has as a solution the use of other sources of energy that allow us to abandon fossil fuels. Electric energy, due to its zero-emission range, is the most viable solution today.
However, this process of changing the energy model also brings its own problems and challenges. Some of the materials used in zero-emission energies are not abundant nor are their extraction done at zero cost, neither ecologically nor socially.
Decarbonization has brought a lawless extractivism in the search for these materials that is not even new: it has already occurred in the history of human industrialization. We can change coal or oil for lithium, but they all come from the same Earth.
This analysis becomes more human and complete if we ask the inhabitants of the Jequitinhonha Valley in Minas Gerais (Brazil), where 8% of the planet’s lithium reserves are concentrated: what has happened to the water they consume? Where have the fauna and flora of their region gone? Why do they frequently visit the doctor suffering from respiratory ailments? What do they put on their table to eat that comes from their immediate surroundings, as before, when they had their orchards and crops?
Voracious extractivism, without control and without measure, without law and with profit as the only criterion, has led to irreversible and deeply damaging consequences, especially in the global South, whose inhabitants are the concrete victims of the greed of others. Exploiting the soil and subsoil without taking into account local populations and its dynamics surely leads to disaster.
These populations are never represented in the decision-making, evaluation and planning bodies of economic activity. The voices that have been able to rise are facing a great enemy, one that has resources and does not mess around. Between 2012 and 2023, more than two thousand defenders of the land have been murdered. Last year alone, there were 196, 166 of them in Latin America, according to Global Witness.
There were already voices in the 80s and 90s of the last century that began to cry out for vulnerable peoples, such as the Augustinian Recollect missionary Cleusa Carolina Rodhy Coelho, murdered in the midst of tensions over the use of indigenous reserves in the Amazon for the profit of a few. Currently, the Augustinian-Recollect Family is part of the Eco-Augustinian Alliance, with other religious families of the Augustinian persuasion. Because Saint Augustine said:
“Behold again, and see if you can. You certainly do not love anything except what is good, since good is the earth, with the loftiness of its mountains, and the due measure of its hills, and the level surface of its plains; and good is an estate that is pleasant and fertile; and good is a house that is arranged in due proportions, and is spacious and bright; and good are animal and animate bodies; and good is air that is temperate, and salubrious; and good is food that is agreeable and fit for health”… (Trinitate 8,3,4).
Pope Francis invites us to maintain an approach to integral ecology, which does not forget “justice in the debates on the environment, to listen to the cry of the earth as well as the cry of the poor” (Laudato Si’ 49).
The message of the ecumenical campaign of the Season of Creation 2024 reinforces this integral understanding from the urgency of listening to the pain of the earth that is sick, giving concrete responses that are ecological, economic, social and political.
The Pope does not tire of calling for synodal ecclesial actions that give prominence to peoples and communities. In Laudate Deum (2023) he has asked for a “multilateralism from below” with representation of local communities and the disadvantaged in the debates to solve the problems of humanity and warn of its specific problems.
The solution to global problems can only be achieved “among all” because the world belongs to everyone. The communities most directly affected by global problems must have their space to show their pain and suffering because they are the ones who lose their land, their water and air are contaminated.
The indigenous peoples give us lessons with their centuries of history and care for the environment, their way of relating and consuming, their symbolic relationship with mother earth lost in industrial and post-industrial society, their understanding of Nature as a living being on which they depend and which they pamper and respect, their common sense of “not throwing stones at their own roof”.
Children grow up barefoot so as not to forget their roots, where they come from, what they depend on. The land is part of their identity as a people and they burn it into their hearts. Barefoot, because the land, their land, is sacred and forms part of their very being. Their relationship with the land is alive, healthy, fraternal. They are absolutely aware that they depend on it. And they care for it as much as their mother. I take care of you, you take care of me!
The Augustinian-Recollect Family lives with several of these indigenous peoples and with the most vulnerable communities in the global South. Serving these communities, accompanying them, we have learned that the earth is a true mother.
As children we sang a Marian song that said we had two mothers: “both love me, both give me their love, I love and care for both of them, I give my love to both of them.” Perhaps we should add a third mother: the biological mother, the spiritual mother who is in Heaven, and the material mother who is the Earth.
Will we be able to see the earth again as the inheritance, the gift of God, as the home of all humanity bathed in the divine light of God?
Will we be able to love the earth again as that good and beautiful mother who takes care of us and we must take care of them?
