Discernment

How Does God See this Issue?

               God is not happy with our earth being ruined daily by the people not taking care of it. Pope Francis went out and spoke about this problem to thousands of people. He starts off by saying we are sinning when we are polluting and destroying our planet. "We need to pray as if everything depended on God's providence, and work as if everything depended on us," he said. God gave us all of these beautiful things and this planet, he can easily take it back if he wants. But, God believes that we can fix this problem. We need to do more than we already are by making this a top priority in our day. God wants us to have a safe life on earth because he loves and cares about us. He created us to be his people to spread the Good News but many of us are forgetting that and doing everyday activities that harm the earth.

                 Ocean pollution causes other problems too. One of the problems it creates is, no drinkable water for everyone. There are so many people who don't have easy access to water and now it is even harder for them to drink water since the water is polluted by oils, chemicals, and other toxic substances. 

                 Ocean pollution also causes global warming, which is "a gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth's atmosphere generally attributed to the greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants." Innocent animals in the north are dying because the climate where they live is drastically becoming warmer and warmer. 

                 Another serious problem this creates is killing our innocent marine animals and plants. God created living things in order to fulfill the earth, and we are killing them more and more every day by littering, not recycling/not recycling correctly, dumping oils, chemicals, and other substances into the ocean through the sewer and etc.. 

                 Ruining God's creation is also in the Sacred Scriptures. It says that God created the earth to brighten up the darkness, which means that he created all of this for our world to be prettier and brighter. "The Genesis Creation story begins by describing the universe as deep darkness that would be completely empty except for the Spirit of God, which moves through it like a wind (1:1–2). God could have let the universe remain that way, full of nothing but God. Instead, out of love, God creates something else. And so the darkness is dispelled with the words, “Let there be light” (1:3)." He also saw the world and everything in it as a good and safe place. "God continues to speak new things into being: water, land, plants, stars, animals, and so on. He is depicted working much as an artist does, stepping back occasionally to judge what is being made. God judges it to be good. As if to emphasize the point, the phrase “And God saw it was good” is repeated seven times in the Creation account. Creation is good because it unfolds from God’s own goodness (Living Justice and Peace, 5)."

Connections to PSJ

Catholic Social Teachings Prayer 

             One of your projects this year was to create a prayer about a CST we were assigned. I was assigned rights and responsibilities and there were so many things I could pray about. But I decided on the rights living things have and the responsibilities we have to protect and help them. My blog relates to the prayers we made because we need the protect every living thing every day, 1 million marine animals die each year because of pollution. 

Catholic Social Teachings Shirt 

            Another one of our projects was to make a shirt advertising a problem in our world today and a place we can help fix it. My shirt was also focused on the rights and responsibilities of living things have. My saying on my t-shirt was "We have the responsibility to protect marine animals" because they have the rights to live and we definitely don't have the right to mistreat them by polluting their home. 

Relationship Map

           Lastly, we had another assignment on walking around somewhere near us and looking at what our environment is like and analyzing the people. For mine, I walked downtown after school and downtown with my family after. I saw people wasting water, sleeping on the sidewalks, begging for food and money, and etc. This walk made me really think how privileged some people are in the world and how they take things for granted and how we also need really to take care of humans too. We are so lucky to have food on the table, a school easy to get to, and a roof over our heads because there are people out there with barely anything.