Quotes for School & Parish Bulletines
- Water
- Global Responsibility
- Environmental Responsibility
- Peace
- Justice
- Mission
- Individual Action & Responsibility
- For Advent
Water
‘Learning respect for the water we use will involve turning from old ways and taking up new ways. It will be part of the ecological conversion to which human beings in the twenty-first century are being called. Responding to this call is one of the great challenges facing the Christian community and the wider human community of the twenty-first century. We all have much to learn from those who have been committed to the well-being of creation. They have already long been learning what it is to live their ecological conversion. We believe that all of us in the Christian community are called by God to discover and to live out our own form of ecological conversion.’
‘The Gift of Water’, A statement endorsed by the Bishops of the Murray-Darling
Basin Oct 4, 2004.
Global Responsibility
‘Every person has a calling to be a good citizen, contributing to the life of the nation. Every nation is part of the international community, responsible for the global common good. So a nation is a global citizen just as a person is, and nations and individual citizens have responsibilities beyond their national borders. What we do increasingly affects what happens to other people and their world. Actions and events outside our borders increasingly affect our lives at home.’
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
Australian Catholic Bishops
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
‘Where we stand depends on where we sit.’
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
The good global citizen will explore globalization from the perspective of those who are not faring well.
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
It is obvious that individual countries cannot rightly seek their own interests and develop themselves in isolation from the rest, for the prosperity and development of one country follows partly in the train of the prosperity and progress of all the rest and partly produces that prosperity and progress.
Looking after the common good means making use of new opportunities for the redistribution of wealth among the different areas of the planet, to the benefit of the underprivileged that until now have been excluded or cast to the sidelines of social and economic progress. The challenge, in short, is to ensure a globalization in solidarity, a globalization without marginalization.
‘Democracy only attains its full realization when each person and nation is able to accede to primary goods – life, food, water, health, education, work, assurance of rights – through the ordering of internal and international relations that ensure for everyone the possibility to participate. And there can only be authentic social justice ina perspective of genuine solidarity, which commits to living and working always with one another, and never one against or to the detriment of others. The great challenge of lay Christians oin today’s world context is to make all this tangible.’
The surest way for Australia to become a better global citizen is for each of us to become more globally aware, connected, involved with and committed to those we can make neighbours. We are called to live our Christian vocation in the world. Pope Benedict XVI has challenged us Catholics when he said: ‘We cannot remain passive before certain processes of globalization which not infrequently increase the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide’ [Sacramentum Caritatis, 90]. It is our vocation to transform the world.
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
Environmental Responsibility
Care for the environment represents a challenge for all humanity. It is a matter of common and universal duty, that of respecting a common good, destined for all.
Humanity must be increasingly conscious of the links between natural ecology, or respect for nature, and human ecology. Experience shows that disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence and vice versa.
World Peace Day Message, 2007
Economic decisions about the use of natural resources must weigh the uncertainties surrounding present circumstances against the pressing need to protect the environment.
There will be an economic cost, but ‘an economy respectful of the environment will not have the maximization of profits as its only objective, because environmental protection cannot be assured solely on the basis of financial calculations of costs and benefits.’
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
As Christians, we appreciate the spiritual and theological significance of the world. We are stewards of a planet and its resources made by God, Creator of heaven and Earth. Our calling to care for creation requires sound moral judgments here and now concerning the use of the world’s resources in our daily lives, in national policies, for future generations and with great concern for those in our world who are in need.
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
“We are challenged to examine our lifestyles and how our choices affect our neighbours: ‘There is a need to break with the logic of mere consumption and promote forms agricultural and industrial production that respect the order of creation and satisfy the basic human needs of all’ [Compendium of Social Doctrine, 486]. This call to each individual, each community and Australia as a global citizen concerns the universal common good and the work for peace in our world.
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
Every time we come to the altar of the Eucharist, the priest offers the bread and wine, given of the earth, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. We do not only offer to God all human efforts and activity. We ‘come to see the world as God’s creation, which brings forth everything we need for our sustenance. The world is not something indifferent, raw material to be utilized simply as we see fit. Rather, it is part of God’s plan, in which all of us are called to be sons and daughters in the one Son of God, Jesus Christ’ [Sacramentum Caritatis, 92].
Social Justice Sunday Statement, 2007
Who Is My Neighbour? Australia’s Role as a Global Citizen
Peace
Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Excessive economic, social and cultural inequalities among peoples arouse tensions and conflicts, and are a danger to peace.
If development is the new name for peace, war and preparations for war are the major enemy of the healthy development of peoples. If we take the common good of all humanity as our norm, instead of individual greed, peace would be possible.
If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
To wage war on misery and to struggle against injustice is to promote, along with improved conditions, the human and spiritual progress of all men, and therefore the common good of humanity. Peace cannot be limited to a mere absence of war, the result of an ever precarious balance of forces. No, peace is something that is built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men.
We are called to be peacemakers, not by some movement of the moment, but by our Lord Jesus. The content and context of our peacemaking is set, not by some political agenda or ideological program, but by the teaching of his Church.
I really see no other solution than to turn inward and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war.
Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for humanity a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?
Justice
Justice will not come until those who are not injured are as indignant as those who are.
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity, it is an act of justice.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.
Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.
Mission
Go to the people, live with them, learn from them, love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But with the best leaders, when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say: ‘We have done this ourselves.’
Proclaim the Gospel constantly and if necessary, use words.
At the end of every Mass, when the celebrant takes leave of the assembly with the words “Go the Mass is ended”, all should feel they are sent as “Missionaries of the Eucharist” to carry to every environment the great gift received. In fact anyone who encounters Christ in the Eucharist cannot fail to proclaim through his or her life the merciful love of the Redeemer.
World Mission Sunday Statement, 2004, 2
Individual action and responsibility
If we want to serve the true God, we must break out of the circle of self-absorption and pay heed to the bloodied faces of our fellow human beings. If we do not share life with the oppressed, we do not share life with God.
The greatest challenge of the day is this: How to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?
Modern people listen more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if they do listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses.
Non cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.
Let no one be discouraged by the belief that there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills, misery, ignorance and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.
After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity—here is the true Christian definition of freedom. Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others.
Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God’s laws—it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that. Poverty comes from man’s injustice to his fellow man.
For Advent
It is often said at Christmas that Jesus is born into every family and every heart. But these “births” must not make us forget the primordial, massive fact that Jesus was born to a humble woman among a little people dominated by what was the greatest empire of the age. If we forget that fact, Christ’s birth becomes an abstraction, a symbol, a cipher…. It is in the concrete setting and circumstances of our lives that we must learn to believe: under oppression and repression but also amid the struggles and hopes; under dictatorships that sow death among the poor, and under the “democracies” that often deal just as unjustly with their needs and dreams.
If we are to dwell in the tent the Son has pitched in our midst, we must enter into our own history here and now, and nourish our hope on the will to life that the poor of today’s world are demonstrating. If we do so, we shall experience in our flesh the encounter with the Word who proclaims the kingdom of life.
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and queens are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins:
To feed the hungry
To release prisoners
To rebuild the nations
To bring peace among peoples
To make music in the heart.
US civil rights leader, 1900-1981
