Celebrate Nature’s Greatest Gift: Life!

April 22, 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. In honor of this anniversary, the pro-life group CatholicVote.org is sponsoring a campaign to celebrate “nature’s greatest gift”: human life. According to LifeSiteNews, “CatholicVote.org is encouraging Americans to rethink how they celebrate Earth Day, and how to go about building a culture that respects the environment.

“Our goal is to use Earth Day to get Americans to think more deeply about what it means to truly respect the Earth and creation,” said Brian Burch, president of CatholicVote.org Education Fund. In order to “bring this balanced Catholic view of the environment to the streets,” Burch said, the group purchased ads (like the one pictured below) broadcasting their message on more than 50 buses in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.

“Prevailing environmental attitudes too often view humans as the enemy of nature,” Burch said. “We believe the human person is God’s greatest creation, and the Earth’s greatest resource. Building up a culture of life is the single most important way to build a culture that respects the environment.”

Burch also points out that “Respect for God’s creation has a long history in Catholic teaching, long before it became popular with our secular culture.”

The LifeSiteNews article cites Pope Benedict XVI as being very vocal in support of proper stewardship of natural resources, pointing out that Newsweek even dubbed him “the green pope.”

Earlier this year, the article continues, Pope Benedict said in his annual address to the Vatican diplomatic corps: “If we wish to build true peace, how can we separate, or even set at odds, the protection of the environment and the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn?”

“The pope has repeatedly emphasized that respect for the environment must be tied to a larger framework, with respect for the human person at its core,” the article said. In a recent encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI wrote the following:

“If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves.”

Like its other recent “Imagine the Potential” ad campaigns promoting the dignity of human life, this CatholicVote.org campaign is brilliant. It uses amazing creativity to remind our culture that human life is not a burden on the earth but rather its greatest gift.

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