Thursday, March 10, 2005
DIVINIZATION OF NATURE AS ECOLOGICAL SIN
ROME, MARCH 9, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Contemporary radical ecology has divinized nature and relegated human beings to a secondary role, participants at a symposium on original sin were told.
"The sin in contemporary radical environmentalism consists in divinizing nature, in suffocating the importance of the human being as custodian of creation, and in forgetting God as author of man's natural surroundings," said Joan Andreu Rocha Scarpetta, professor of theology of religions at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University. The institution sponsored the symposium.
Rocha's address, entitled "Radical Ecology and Original Sin," was one of the addresses delivered at the March 3-4 symposium, whose theme was "Original Sin: An Interdisciplinary Perspective." Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, opened the event.
"Contemporary radical environmentalism has forgotten divine transcendence; it has placed man on the same level or below nature" and, in forgetting the created character of nature, "has given it a magical, almost divine value," said Rocha.
