Gustavo Gutierrez
has said that there will never be a revolution in Latin America if religion is
not incorporated as part of that process. Thomas Berry is convinced that there
will never be a transformation of Western civilization toward a sustainable
economy if we do not develop a positive ecozoic spirituality. I do not believe
that any serious attempt to transform Western civilization towards a
sustainable ecozoic economy, rooted in an ecozoic consciousness and
spirituality, can by-pass the presence of the Roman Catholic Church as an
institution that includes one-fourth of the world’s population as members and
that both historically and in contemporary global terms embodies the cultural
foundation of Western civilization, its values and its underlying “mythology.”
[Today I would need to add something
about the role of Indigenous cultures - and I will turn to that in coming days.]
In the Catholic Church, it is the local parish that is the sociological foundation
stone. Local parishes have one significant advantage. They have a very local
geographically based focus. And there is no place on earth that does not have “its
parish.” Thus local parishes can provide a setting for reaching a good portion
of the population with an education for the ecozoic age. It is estimated that
approximately 20% of the population of Canada attends Mass at a Roman Catholic
parish every Sunday. While the percentage in countries like Peru is much lower
[as also in Quebec] , my experience
has been that parishes have a way of being present in the kind of communities
that exist in Latin America in a way that, even though few may attend Mass on a
regular basis, the parish can have a direct influence on life in the entire
community. Obviously the educational effort will run up against many odds, many
of them reinforced by the very doctrines and institutional structures of the
Church itself. This does not mean there
are not “openings” or “spaces” where education can begin and proceed.
What I am
calling for (and I am not alone) is nothing less than another and different “Copernican
revolution” that would, this time, not be in relation to the Ptolemaic world
but in contrast to the absence of cosmology in the modern, scientific,
technological world. It will be a cosmology that reinstates the Earth as the
central focus of our cosmology and gives that cosmology both a practical role
in our life cycles and a spiritual place in our relationship with God. Earth
will not be just a “resource” to dominate but a living organism of which we, as
humans, are a part. God-language will ake on a more creation-centred
perspective in which creation is understood as an unfolding process of the
emergence of every new and divergent life forms. Humans will be understood as
the conscience of the Earth, called to responsibility for it and to live in
harmony with it. Redemption will be seen not as a salvation out of the earth
but rather as a gift of healing of what we have done to the Earth and an
invitation to share responsibility for that healing. Society will be seen as a
challenge to live in partnership with one another and the earth. One of the
advantages of working in the context of the Roman Catholic Church (and, in that
context, looking for the cracks in the wall that can give us an entry-point) is
that, despite the wholesale capitulation to much of modern competitive,
anthropocentric perspectives, the parish has retained more contact with
medieval cosmology than most other modern institutions.
[I go on to talk about this in terms of
conversion which, technically means
turning around: in this case to old wisdoms.]
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