As the Social Justice department of the Bishops' Conference launches a new revised edition of the Bishops' teaching document on the environment The Call of Creation, Bishop John Arnold, our episcopal lead for environmental matters, has been speaking to us about the current ecological crisis, our responsibilities as Catholics and custodians of the created world, and his belief that we all need to play our part to protect our common home.

Transcription

We're fundamentally going to talk about the 'Call of Creation', which is the Bishops' teaching document on the environment, released in 2002, and I know it was revised along the way by CAFOD, but we are now re-releasing in 2022. Just tell us why we're doing this now.

Well, I think the world was woken up a great deal by Laudato Si, Pope Francis' encyclical, and that did a great service not just to the people of the church, but to the world. But still we're not acting quickly enough. And if you look at the statistics that are emerging we're really making a terrible mess of the environment and it's having an appalling impact on so many people around the world.

In the news… Pakistan - 33 million people directly affected by climate change. We've got Japan with Typhoon Nanmadol - three million people evacuated; the Puerto Rico typhoon; Alaskan storms; the west states of the United States with their wildfires; Kentucky with its ongoing flood damage. Really, it's an appalling state of affairs. When are we going to make it urgent to be effective in our response?

And that's really before we mention war and other things that are going on in our world… Let's go back to your foreword for The Call of Creation, in which you say a truly Catholic understanding of the environmental crisis does not see it as a series of individual problems that need to be solved. Now, I find that very interesting. How should we, then, as Catholics, respond to this environmental crisis?

Well, I think Pope Francis gives us a lead, when he says everything is connected and that each and every one of us has our part to play.

We've got to see climate change and the damage it's doing as not just a series of things that we can cure one by one. It's a matter of care for creation as a whole, which means changing our lifestyle and everyone has got to be part of that. It also includes our political actions. The war in Ukraine is an appalling, damaging feature for the environment. It's a dreadful thing to be happening. It's affecting food supplies and destroying property. There is evidence of a number of deaths that have not yet been accounted for. It's all connected and we've got to have a global look, as Pope Francis says, and put these things together so that we can recognise a plan for all of us in order to save our common home.

Now, without getting too controversial, I think there might be something of a problem with the psychology behind action. Sometimes you'll get people saying, well, what about India, China, the US, ourselves, the big polluters? How can we avoid individuals getting disheartened by these big polluters so they carry on doing their bit, changing their relationship with the environment, going about it in a positive way, thinking about their consumption, recycling etc? How do we keep their spirits up so they continue to make a difference?

Well, I think Christian hope has a great deal to do with this - that we've not been defeated. Pope Francis is very clear, we live on in hope and that hope can't be just something that we put nicely on the windowsill and say, it will happen, we've got to be part of this. And it's all very well to feel very pessimistic about certain nations in the world and what's going terribly wrong and they're correcting their ways of destroying the environment.

At the same time, we've got quite an upsurge of popular understa