As reported by in the December 20th issue of Our Sunday Visitor, "to mitigate the ecological damage caused by human-induced climate change, a central element should be the promotion of policies intended to curb the growth of the world’s human population....that’s the case that the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) made in its State of World Population 2009 annual report....But Catholic experts who monitor the population issue say the claim that population growth needs to be curbed to save the world from global warming is based on multiple unsound premises” (Tom McFeely, "U.N. Report Links Climate Change to Population," OSV, 12/20/09).
In the December 17th issue of the Catholic Standard and Times, Cindy Wooden rightly notes that the Holy Father indeed views: “The degradation of the environment…[to be] a pressing moral problem that threatens peace & human life itself.” Yet, Ms. Wooden's coverage of Pope Benedict XVI’s 12/8/09 Message for the World Day of Peace does not adequately contrast "authentic Christian ecology" with the anti-people bile being pumped out of the United Nations.
In his World Day of Peace message, the Holy Father reminds us that “seeing creation as God’s gift to humanity helps us understand our vocation & worth as human beings." Diametrically opposed to the U.N.'s thinly veiled bigotry, the Holy Father is promoting "an authentic ‘human ecology,’" recognizing
- "the inviolability of human life at every stage and in every condition, the dignity of the person and the unique mission of the family…. a correct understanding of the relationship between man and the environment will not end by absolutizing nature or by considering it more important than the human person. If the Church’s magisterium expresses grave misgivings about notions of the environment inspired by ecocentrism and biocentrism, it is because such notions eliminate the difference of identity and worth between the human person and other living things. In the name of a supposedly egalitarian vision of the ‘dignity’ of all living creatures, such notions end up abolishing the distinctiveness and superior role of human beings. They also open the way to a new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism, which would see the source of man’s salvation in nature alone, understood in purely naturalistic terms” <www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20091208_xliii-world-day-peace_en.html>
