Pope Warns on Environment

By Tim Johnston - New York Times
Thursday, July 17, 2008 - Web Link
Send this news item to a Friend
Sign-up for Daily News Updates

July 17, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI used his first major address at the Roman Catholic Church’s youth festival on Thursday to warn that the world was being scarred and its natural resources used up by humanity’s “insatiable consumption.”

In a broad criticism of consumer culture, before a crowd of more than 140,000 on a dock in Sydney harbor, Benedict reinforced the Vatican’s growing concern with protecting the environment, a theme he has addressed before.

“Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption," he said.

The pope also criticized television and the Internet for treating violence and sexual exploitation as entertainment and attacked moral relativism, laying out an agenda for the festival focusing on social justice and the environment.

The Vatican has increasingly spoken out about the environment and the pope has raised his concerns about the emptiness of secularism, messages that seem tailored specifically for young audiences.

The pope made his address to the festival, an event that has brought together an estimated half-million people from 170 countries, after crossing Sydney Harbor in a white tour boat and climbing onto the dock where thousands of people stood to listen to him in the evening sun.