The Rt. Rev. Thabo Makgoba, Archbishop of Cape Town and Primate of the Church of Southern Africa, writes on his weblog about Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, mi’ Signore:
I would like to thank Pope Francis for this historic, ground-breaking letter. I look forward to studying it in more detail.
Across Africa and in other developing countries, we are already suffering the impacts of climate change, and the people hit hardest by severe droughts or storms are in our most vulnerable communities.
… The values of dignity and fairness are at the heart of how we respond to the crisis. How we look after the environment is at its core about how we value our fellow human beings.
Not only that, it is about how we value the rest of God’s creation and treat the resources God has entrusted to us. Pope Francis evokes this beautifully when he cites how St Francis of Assisi communed with all creation, preaching to even the flowers, and in addressing the Lord, how he referred to our planet as “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us…”
I welcome especially the way in which Pope Francis has underlined the attention that has been drawn to what he calls “the ethical and spiritual roots of environmental problems” by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, requiring “that we look for solutions not only in technology but in a change of humanity; otherwise we would be dealing merely with symptoms.”