Abp. in Barcelona for the Care of our Common Home
As part of the America's Cultural Cup Race that Barcelona is hosting in early September, the city's Diocesan Museum has hosted, on 9 September, a round table discussion on the sustainability of the planet with the presence of the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia.
Theme of the meeting: ‘Oceans: beauty and destruction. Reflections around the work of Mandy Barker and the thought of Pope Francis’.
Invited by the diocesan delegation of Faith and Culture of the Archdiocese of Barcelona, Abp. Paglia has dialogued with the British photographer Mandy Barker, who through her artistic work promotes a profound change in the global cycle of plastic, and with the researcher of the Higher Centre for Scientific Research, Dr. Joan Grimalt. The debate was moderated by Prof. Margarita Bofarull i Buñuel, rscj, diocesan delegate for the Pastoral Care of Faith and Culture.
Archbishop Paglia underlined in his speech that:
‘It is urgent to outline a new humanism that I would call planetary. It is a humanism that makes the care of relations between humans and creation its focal point. It is a humanism of interdependence between everyone and everything. It is the condition in which we live. Nothing and no one is an island. Everyone and everything is welcomed into the common home that is our Planet with its Earth, its Sea and its Sky. It is an objective fact that envelops us and surpasses us. But at the same time it needs us. And, unfortunately, we are not always aware of this. It is from this ignorance that the grave - sometimes deadly - offences against both mankind and creation arise. The challenge before us, which we cannot evade, is to transform this planetary interdependence into a political, economic, cultural and spiritual choice to build a civilisation of the Planet that means peaceful and global coexistence between everyone and everything. The Planet, with its Earth, its Sea and its Sky, is in our hands. We have the responsibility to achieve that global communion that leads the Planet to become the common Homeland. It is an epochal challenge. Indeed, as Pope Francis says, we are in the midst of an epochal change. We are asked for courage and creativity to realise that global fraternity from which nothing and no one is excluded'.