BY FR. SHAY CULLEN
THE HURT, pain and damage to the lives of countless indigenous children was at the top of Pope Francis’ visit to Canada recently.
The climate change damage to their ancestral lands and environment by the economic activities of big business was also on his mind, which he spoke forcibly and clearly.
Pope Francis has strongly commented on the destructive climate change caused by the rich nation’s outpouring of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming and climate change seen in many devastating wildfires, drought in some countries, floods elsewhere, and poverty everywhere, by the failed policies of the government and big business on a scale never seen before. Everything is connected.
Pope Francis challenged them recently on the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation and called on world leaders to address climate change and growing poverty, especially among indigenous peoples.
He visited the Canadian indigenous people to bring apologies and help to the former victims and survivors of abuse in Church-run, government-funded residential schools. He advocates for a halt to government destructive environmental policies affecting the indigenous people of Canada.
His call to the rich nations is that they must act to stop the destruction caused by climate change since they have been destroying the environment for two hundred years, silencing and corrupting nature’s song of life and rebirth.
“Tragically, that sweet song is accompanied by a cry of anguish. Or even better: a chorus of cries of anguish. In the first place, it is our sister, Mother Earth, who cries out. Prey to our consumerist excesses, she weeps and implores us to put an end to our abuses and to her destruction,” he said.
Pope Francis repeated the message he made last year “In the name of God.” He called on the governments to stop enabling businesses and multinational corporations from destroying the natural world through mining. “To stop destroying forests, wetlands, and mountains, to stop polluting rivers and seas, to stop poisoning food and people,” he said. They have an “ecological debt” to pay for they are responsible for most of the damage to the environment and are the root cause of poverty and hurt to the indigenous people in the world.
Pope Francis went to the Canadian Arctic to Iqaluit, supposedly the coldest place in the Northern Hemisphere but with global warming, it is losing the people’s traditional source of food. His first visit was to the indigenous people in Edmonton, and later Iqaluit and Quebec, marked with simplicity and no official welcome.
Besides addressing the devastating effects of the non-stop burning of coal, oil, and gas to fuel the world economy, Pope Francis also spoke on the devastating effects of systematic physical, psychological and sexual abuse of the children of indigenous people in the Canadian government’s Church-run residential schools where hundreds of thousands of native children were incarcerated and forced to abandon their native culture and values. (To be continued)/PN
