This month the Pope asks us ‘that the riches of creation be preserved, valued and made available to all, as a precious gifts from God to mankind’.
I stood recently on top of the cone-like structure of Monte Vesuvio, near Naples, staring into a deep crater, from which gentle plumes of smoke still wafted. The last eruption of this volcano was in 1944, and there have been many such over the centuries, the most infamous in 79 A.D., when the nearby towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed. I had a sense of the terrible beauty of nature, and of our human puniness in its regard. Awe, then, but also fear.
This sense has, of course, been reinforced of late with the volcanic eruptions in Iceland and the consequent inconvenience to air travelers. It came as such a shock at first: planes grounded all over Europe, how could this be?
And all this can serve as a metaphor for the global economic recession that we are experiencing: it almost seems that something like a force of nature has shifted the tectonic plates under our feet, so that we blunder about, bewildered, angry, frightened as we seek to regain our footing on solid ground. Are things out of control?
The Pope's intention for this month is directing us to that solid ground. We have lived through a phase in human history, especially in our Western world, when it seemed that humankind was in control of its own destiny. We valued so much progress and modernity, individual liberty seen as human rights and freedom from restraint, control over nature through science and technology. We took for granted increased prosperity and saw in all this a recipe for happiness.
But somewhere along the way we forgot that our progress resides in using well the gifts (the talents) that God has given us, that the individual is truly human when in relationship, and that our use of nature and our environment is to be a matter of respectful stewardship and not manipulative dominion. Our God is a God of Trinity, of relationships of love, of giving and receiving in equality, and we are made in God's image: to be happy we need to choose this relational way of living, conscious of the common good, of solidarity with all, of the preferential option for the poor, of what Catholic Social Teaching calls 'the universal destination of goods'.
How could we have been so complacent with so much hunger and poverty in our world, how could we have been so heedless of our environment when scientific estimates tell us that for everyone to live at current European levels of consumption we would need more than double the biocapacity actually available - the equivalent of 2.1 planet Earths - to sustain us (and if we consumed at the US rate, we would require nearly five!)? How could we have imagined, against all the wisdom of the pagan ancients like Plato and Aristotle, not to mention the richness of the world's and our own religious tradition, that our happiness lay so primarily in wealth?
The answer is the old human one: we have been tempted to idolatry, and we have sinned. Like our Jewish ancestors in the First (Old) Testament, we have gone astray, we have worshiped on the High Places at the Temples, not now of the Baals, but of the free market, and in the cathedrals of conspicuous consumption. We need to meet God again, not now in the High Places of false gods, but on the holy mountain of the burning bush, where the terror of nature is revealed as the site of revelation. And through our meeting with God we need to re-learn how to take our place in our world.
Pope Benedict in his recent (2009) Encyclical Charity in Truth spelled out what some of this re-learning might involve. In particular he spoke a lot about gratuity, the logic of gift which does not exclude justice. What Benedict seems to be drawing our attention to is that beyond the market (a main focus of which is on profit) and the State (which deals with law, contract, redistribution) there is the realm of civil society which can be a natural setting for an economy of gratuitousness, in which values like the common good and solidarity may be most visibly present. This presence of the logic of gratuity in civil society act as catalyst for it to be present in the other two spheres also.
What Benedict is urging us to consider is a radical transformation of our economic model in which basic needs and modest 'wants' are met, but in which gross inequalities and environmental abuses are eliminated. This would, of course, require an enormous transformation of mind-set to achieve, and some considerable sacrifice too on the part of those who are now well-off, beyond any sense of need or reasonable desire. It would require new approaches to banking and finance, as well as to the real economy, in which human dignity took precedence over the dominant model of individual gain and survival of the fittest. Many good people, religious and non-religious, are working hard, in a complex area, to identify the right shape of these new approaches. It will be up to us as responsible citizens to hold our politicians to account in this respect.
We have an opportunity in these times of new awareness of human frailty and puniness to make this kind of radical change. Admittedly the task is complicated and enormous. But, as Pope John-Paul II once said, there is personal sin in taking 'refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world' (Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 1984). Putting this more positively, St Paul reminds us that 'hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us' (Romans, 5, 5). A sense of awe again, but now with love. The Pope's Intention for this month is so worth our prayer, our thought and our action.