Family Approach to the Global Environment

The Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that the family and not the individual is the basic cell of society. It is in the family that the individual learns the basic skills for life in society. In the family we experience justice and love between brothers and sisters, the role of authority expressed by parents, the loving concern for the members who are weaker because of youth, sickness and old age, mutual help in the necessities of life, readiness to accept others and, if necessary, to forgive them.

The ‘school house’ of the family equips us for getting on with one another in wider society. Society will only function well with “the generous consent of all its members.” Where contemporary society acts like a family there is little need for state intervention.

When it comes to global environmental issues, the Holy Father encourages us act as “the human family, which dwells in that common house which is the earth”. Families strive for generous consensus and not brutal coercion. He encourages us to be “uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions.” I take that to be a reference to the agents of the New World Order, who are backing one-sided scientific conferences, who are saying that we are only one species among many others, and who want to drastically reduce the world population with evil means.

In that ideology, the individual and not the family is the basic cell of society. Like Communist Russia and China, the politico-economic power will undermine and take over the God-given work of families. By trying to make the individual paramount, they are really trying to make themselves paramount.

In confronting the issue of global warming, we need to draw on our own experiences of the family way of doing things, encourage the beleaguered parents in contemporary western society and use the approach that we are all one family sharing a global home.

Click here to see the Holy Father's message for the World Day of Peace on 1 January 2008