Just one real quick announcement, thanks to a very fine Catholic organization that works with the spiritual and material well-being of farmers.

They're called Catholic Rural Life.

There's a set of thought-provoking cards that are free that I suggest that you kick up.

They're entitled, eating is a moral act.

All right.

So this talk is going to be very dense. I hope everyone has the

handout. I'm going to cover five figures in the space of 42 minutes, all of which could be spoken about for easily an hour.

First, I simply wanted to define environmentalism. So environmentalism is the branch of ethics that deals with how we ought to treat

the environment, the air, the water, the plants, the animals, and so forth. Now, is there a part of

the suma that's devoted to environmentalism? Well, of course not, okay? But why is that? Well,

environmentalism wasn't on St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas

radar screen the way it is on ours, simply because they didn't realize that we could seriously

disrupt the harmony of nature. Whereas now we know that if we don't take care of the environment,

that it has tremendous consequences as far as human beings getting sick and even dying.

Now, what those authors did have, however, is the basis for a Catholic environmentalism, namely a theology of creation.

So the basic idea is that God created the earth to serve certain purposes.

And so what we ought to do is respect God's purposes for creation.

So what are those purposes? Well, the first quote you have on your handout is from the

compendium of the catechism of the Catholic Church. And it asked the question, what does sacred

scripture teach about the creation of the visible

world? And it responds, through the account of the six days of creation, sacred scripture

teaches us the value of the created world and its purpose, namely to praise God and serve humanity.

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