A joyful noise made by the sounding of bells, gongs, horns and other instruments at the Church of the Crossroads on Sunday joined a chorus of voices in support of Pope Francis in Rome, as he threw the weight of the Roman Catholic Church behind saving the planet.
About 30 people attended the Honolulu celebration, a small number compared with the thousands cheering the pope’s encyclical on climate change, a historic policy announced June 18 at St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, said Chuck Burrows, a Crossroads organizer. His church co-sponsored the event with Hawaii Interfaith Power and Light, a religious environmental advocacy group, in conjunction with GreenFaith: Interfaith Partners in Action for the Earth, which organized a march at the Vatican event, Burrows said.
There were readings from the Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish and Hawaiian religions interspersed with the sound-making, and a symbolic walk around the Crossroads courtyard, he said.
An Associated Press story June 18 called the pope’s encyclical "a landmark foray by the Vatican into the area of environmental policy," and an attempt by Pope Francis to "reframe the issue in moral terms."
"Francis called for a bold cultural revolution, framing climate change as an urgent moral issue and blaming global warming on an unfair, fossil fuel-based industrial model that harms the poor most. He urged people of every faith to save God’s creation for future generations," the report said.
In a sermon, the Rev. James Fung, interim minister at Crossroads, said: "Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change is a wake-up call to our slumbering minds and indifferent hearts to the damage we are doing to God’s creation by treating the oceans, the forests, the hills and the farmlands of our world as if everything were free for the taking — as if there were an endless amount of resources that can keep being extracted without a long-term vision of how depleted resources, over-dependence on fossil fuels, can lead to disastrous consequences."
"The resources of our planet do not belong to us — to take and to do with as we please — to gouge, to plunder, that is — to rape the earth. God created the world as a beautiful garden and placed us in the midst of it to ‘dress, till and preserve the earth’ (Genesis 2:15) — to be the loving caretakers of God’s creation," Fung said.
Bishop Larry Silva of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu said in a statement:
"The encyclical is food for much thought and will need to be studied and ‘digested’ before we come up with any further plans for implementation. … One major item, however, is how our throwaway culture not only hurts the environment but hurts the poor most of all.
"There are links between ecology and the economy. We are certainly very concerned with the growing poverty in our state and our nation, particularly manifested in the growing number of homeless. Many of our parishes (not to mention Catholic Charities Hawai‘i, and HOPE Services) have outreach programs to care for our sisters and brothers in need of food … (and) many of our parishioners have been engaged in rehabilitating unoccupied housing units or building homes." Silva said.
A few years ago the diocese also started placing photovoltaic systems on all of its parishes statewide, "not only for ecological reasons but for cost savings on energy bills," he added.
"The encyclical challenges us to go beyond meeting immediate needs and to find sustainable solutions to the problems that cause poverty. Among those is the strengthening of families. … (The plan is still being formulated.) It also challenges us to change our penchant for immediate gratification and commit ourselves to long-term solutions that build a solid future not only for ourselves but for the generations that will follow us.
"Pope Francis called for dialogue about these very complex matters, and we will be thinking about how best such a dialogue could be structured," Silva said.
