Order in Nature

+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
11 Jan 2009

Each year before Christmas the Pope meets with his fellow workers in the Roman Curia to exchange Christmas greetings.

On December 22 he organized his long discourse around the theme of God's Spirit in the world.  He mentioned it was 40 years since Pope Paul's controversial letter "Humanae Vitae" which set out the Christian understanding of sexuality, linking it to love and life and rejecting the use of artificial contraception.  Today, in our part of the world, this teaching against contraception is rejected and ignored, as much as the Christian teaching against pre-marital sexual activity.  That doesn't mean that both teachings are wrong or useless.

The Pope roamed widely in this talk and commended the Sydney World Youth Day as a wonderful example of the Spirit at work.

In every generation the Church has to struggle to make God visible, especially with the young, so that they will recognize early on the value of life and commit themselves to struggle against evil.

The Pope also spoke about the role of the Creator Spirit in creating the universe and maintaining it in existence.  It is an essential part of the Christian creed to believe that God created the world, and to acknowledge that our ability to recognize and build on the universe's mathematical structures, those simple beautiful principles, is also the Spirit at work.

For Christians human beings are the crown of creation, the significant thread of meaning through the universe.  This does not imply that we can do what we please to the environment, but that we have a duty and responsibility to it.  Neither is any generation entitled to exploit the earth's resources to the detriment of future generations.

All this means that we have to search for the language of creation among men and women just as we have to respect the laws of nature, when dealing with the atmosphere, the oceans and our landscapes.

So we search to recognize the moral laws which contribute to human flourishing, just as a better understanding of healthiness has contributed to lowering rates of disease.  We now know how infections spread, the importance of sanitation, that cigarettes can cause cancer and have taken appropriate measures.

The Pope insisted that the complementary nature of men and women is essential to this human ecology and that such respect is a precondition for the good life, for the proper exercise of human freedom and the continuity of the human race.

Christians link sexual activity to love and life, which protects love and children from being reduced to a commodity, defends the future against the demands of the moment, and human nature against dangerous manipulations.

Already in Spain government decree has tried to replace the terms "mother" and "father" with progenitor A and progenitor B.

Society strengthens or weakens with the health or frailty of marriage and family.