Vale Thomas Berry

Passionist priest Thomas Berry died in the USA on 1 June, aged 94. According to many, he was Catholicism's most significant thinker in ecological theology. Thomas Berry said that the great determining element of his life was his experience of the natural world. He came to realise that a Christian need not be alienated from it.

‘The more I gave to the study of the human venture, the more clearly I saw the need to go back to the dynamics of life itself. I was progressively led back to the study of the earth community, including its geological and biological as well as its human components. I call myself a geologian.'

Religion, he argued, was meant to provide a way of making sense of ourselves and the cosmos. 'The greatest failure of Christianity in the total course of its history is its inability to deal with the devastation of the planet. Christians have sensitivity to suicide, homicide and genocide but we commit biocide (the killing of the life systems of the planet) and geocide (the killing of the planet itself) and we have no morality to deal with it'. 'Religion', he concludes, 'is absorbed with the pathos of the human.'

‘Our theological view of God is incomplete if we do not take seriously the fact that it was God who made the world and is therefore profoundly related to it. 'If we lose the splendour of the natural world, we lose our true sense of the divine.'

Read more at: http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=14319

 [NIB Vol 28 No. 5 July 2009]