A periodic report on our work, one issue at a time
November 2009
Faith Ecology Economy Project
Why focus on faith, ecology and economy?
Maryknollers living in Asia, Africa and Latin America are witnessing rising seal levels, warming temperatures, increasingly frequent and intense floods and storms that threaten the world’s most vulnerable people and species with starvation, poverty and extinction. All of these events are overshadowed by a global economic crisis that triggers inaction and far-from-adequate responses, pointing to the fact that “business as usual” is not possible if we are to truly care for all life on Earth.
At the heart of the current global social and ecological crises is an economic system that tries to lock interconnected societies into unsustainable patterns of production, over-consumption and waste, all driven by the mandate to grow. To date, this economic model has proven to promote overgrowth in some areas while leaving vulnerable populations with few benefits of development. Maryknollers around the world have witnessed how the global economy has left the common good aside, making a small number of individuals extremely wealthy while a majority of people, communities and shared natural systems that underpin the world’s ecosystems are left to suffer.
Future generations on our planet are threatened by these global patterns of production, over-consumption and waste. Protecting the common good requires that we heed Scripture’s frequent calls to embrace sufficiency as a way of life (see Exodus 16, Leviticus 23-25 and Luke 12: 13-34.) Catholic social teaching also guides us to care for God’s creation and stresses that the realization and protection of human dignity is only done in the context of right relationships with the wider society and Earth. How we organize our society – economically and politically through laws and policies – directly affects the global commons, human dignity and the capacity of individuals to flourish in community.
