Lenten Journey Week 8: The Care for All Creation
The final week of our Lenten Journey (April 22-25) sees us shifting our attention to an examination of the Care for All of God’s Creation. This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the publication of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ and we would like to mark it, as well as the final week in our eight-week Lenten Journey, with a public presentation and display of photographs and pieces of art submitted by individuals throughout our community. Have we tweaked your interest? Please. We encourage you to read on.
Looking to Laudato Si’ for inspiration:
Laudato Si’ – On the Care for our Common Home – is the Holy Father’s seminal Encyclical Letter on the environment and human ecology. The letter is addressed to “every person living on this planet” and calls for a global dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet through our daily actions and decisions. The World Council of Churches and many environmental organisations of different faiths backgrounds welcomed the encyclical. It criticises consumerist driven, profit-seeking economies, and emphasizes acute sensitivity to debt, inequality, and poverty. It calls on all of us to play a part in building a more just and sustainable world. We see that right now, the whole world is hurting.
Several main themes run through the text:
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- Every single person on earth is connected by the very fact that we all inhabit the earth, which is our “common home.” However, how are we shaping the future of our planet? We have made it “look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
- Climate change is a global problem with serious implications; it represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.
- The letter advocates seeking clean and renewable energy sources, a “basic and universal human right” to drinkable water, and more far-sighted practices that respect the earth’s biodiversity and seek to protect species that are close to extinction. “Each year sees the disappearance of thousands of plant and animal species which we will never know, which our children will never see, because they have been lost forever.”
- It points to media and the digital world that contribute to a sort of “mental pollution” through the production of “noise and distractions of an information overload.”
- Modernity has been marked by an excessive anthropocentrism: more and more, human beings take on a self-centred position, focused exclusively on themselves and on their own power. This results in a “use and throw away” logic.
- What is happening in our home concerns “rapidification” — that is, “the continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet combined with a more intensified pace of life and work”. “Rapidification” is a lifestyle that must be reconsidered. This is not to denounce progress. Unsustainable production, consumption, and disposal is NOT progress.
- The starting point is “to aim for a new lifestyle”. Education in environmental responsibility can encourage ways of acting which directly and significantly affect the world around us, such as avoiding the use of plastic and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, recycling, cooking only what can reasonably be consumed, showing care for other living beings, using public transport or car-pooling, planting trees, turning off unnecessary lights.
As part of Week 8 of our STMC Lenten Journey, we are hosting a photography & art contest open to the STMC Community (current students, family members, and alumni).
Capture what “Care For All Creation” means to you! Submit an original photograph or artwork (AI-generated images are prohibited) to reflect key messages that show:
- The incredible beauty of our physical world (e.g. photos of landscapes and natural environments near and far)
- The local biodiversity (e.g. flowers, fauna, insects, wildlife: ecosystems of all types)
- The importance of our waterways (e.g. rivers, ports, straights, seas and oceans)
- Challenges as a consequence of our lifestyles (e.g. the residual effects of human-physical interactions)
- Actions for positive change – examples of local initiatives (e.g. individuals, agencies, activities – food recycling, tree planting, reducing carbon footprint)
Deadline for submissions: Apr. 11, 2025
Click below to read the full contest details and submission form!
