Joint message
Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew join forces again. This time, to defend the environment based on something that both have particularly at heart, that is, “that human dignity and prosperity are deeply connected with the care of the whole Creation”. However, the two religious leaders write, “the history of the world shows a very different situation. It reveals a morally decadent scenario, where our attitudes and behaviours towards Creation make our call to be God’s helpers fade out”. Francis and Bartholomew denounce, above all, the “tendency to break the delicate, well-balanced ecosystems of the world, the insatiable desire to manipulate and control the limited resources of the planet, the greediness in making unlimited profits from the market”. “We no longer respect nature as a shared gift”, they write. “We consider it instead a private possession; we no longer relate to nature to support it; we lord on it, instead, to feed our structures”.
