Priest and Doctor Josep Maria Montiu de Nuix offers Exaudi’s readers his article entitled “Ecology Today,” in which he reflects on its importance and how it refers to the very nature of things.
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Lately, the scientific community is beginning to realize how very correct Pope Francis is in his encyclical Laudato Si’, on ecology. Essential to ecology is to consider the nature of things: the animals, the Earth, the care of our common home . . . It’s extremely important not to allow human life to be extinguished in the Cosmos. Ecology is something capital. A hierarchy can be established in keeping with the degrees of importance of all the things with which it is concerned.
Climate change fosters the advent of fires… Merely material goods are smoke, that is, there is a voracious fire that can devour them, without leaving a trace of them. This is the law of material things, which indicates that they are only of secondary importance.
Given that ecology is also concerned with animals, and given also that man — an embodied spirit, a being endowed with a spiritual and immortal soul, is an animal, concretely, a rational animal, so there must be an ecology of man the latter is very important, as man is, concretely, a rational animal., it follows that there must be an ecology of man. The latter is very important, as man is infinitely above material values in as much as there is an insurmountable qualitative leap between the material and the spiritual. As opposed to what is true of irrational animals, in man in addition to speaking of beauty, one can speak of simple spiritual elegance, of delicacy, of fineness, of elevation of the spirit, of a new dimension, of higher regions. Man is the animal that has his feet on the earth and can have his mind and heart in Heaven.
Ecology considers the very nature of things. However, found in nature itself is the existence of men and women, of masculinity and femininity. So ecology cannot be reconciled with the gender ideology.
Ecology seeks the preservation of living beings. Therefore, it cannot be reconciled with abortive machismo. The abortion movement can be described as machista for three reasons. The first is because statistically, the majority of newly procreated persons are feminine human beings and, consequently, in principle, there is a great probability that a girl is aborted. The second, because today one cannot know of the human being conceived and unborn is a boy or a girl, the unjust view that identifies boys with being a more productive value, a greater generator of wealth, makes it more probable that girls are aborted. The third, because the doctor, after touching the money of induced abortion, cares not at all about the mother’s serious post-abortion symptoms. Obviously, ecology is also opposed to euthanasia.
The Natural Law is very important for any true ecology. Understood by Natural Law is “the light of natural reason, by which we discern the good and the bad (…) the divine light imprinted in us” St. Thomas I-II, q. 91, a. 2). Thus, for example, it’s of the Natural Law that we are to do good and avoid evil. This is something that is known without the need to take recourse to faith. In particular, it’s of the Natural Law and, therefore, it’s a truth proper of all perennial ecology that, as Saint Paul VI’s very important encyclical Humanae Vitae has pointed out, “conjugal love must be fully human, exclusive and open to a new life. Opposed to this is the contraceptive pill — a truth so repeated by Pope Saint John Paul II, and so reiterated by Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia, which has such an important echo in this year of the family, in this Amoris Laetitia Family Year. This chaste conjugal love, opposed to the contraceptive mentality, advocated by all true human ecology, is the liberation of woman, whereas what enslaves her is moral disorder.
The cosmos has been very deteriorated by human beings’ sins. Through sins, we have destroyed, deteriorated, and sullied the beautiful creative work of the Divine Architect. Sin is what most sullies what is greatest in the rational animal: his soul. Sin contaminates this spiritual animal. The absolution of the Sacrament of Confession restores the sullied waters of the soul, so that in their place clean and purifying waters spring, which have their source in Christ’s Heart. Therefore, absolution purifies something very important of nature. To one who has a dead soul, who is a walking corpse, sacramental absolution restores sanctifying grace. To be in God’s grace is infinitely above being without it. To be in God’s grace is something qualitatively very superior. As Saint Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer said, to be in God’s grace is the greatest thing. Therefore, according to Cardinal Piacenza, “in this connection every particular sacramental absolution is the greatest contribution that can be given to human ecology, to the soul’s ecology and through the latter, to the ecology of the world and of the universe.”
Translation by Virginia M. Forrester
