Caring for Our Common Home

I will start from my personal experience and development in the Catholic faith and the Church’s concern for the poor and underprivileged and its social teachings. Caring for our common home has become something that we cannot ignore.

My first concrete contact with God was after I became an altar boy when I was eight years old.

I could feel the presence of God when I sat quietly looking out into the ocean and sky. I could also feel God within his whole creation, and this helped me also to care for the environment.

A Leaf Falling and Returning to its Roots

My father was born in 1887 in Hong Kong and regarded Hong Kong as part of China and his hometown. He emigrated overseas in the early 1930s, but in 1947 he felt he was already old and was going to die soon. So for the sake of being “a leaf falling and returning to its roots,” he returned to Hong Kong to die on Chinese soil. He ultimately died in 1948.

My father affected me most deeply in my sense of belonging to, and caring for, China and the Chinese people as a whole, and I first entered mainland China in 1978 to begin contacting the Catholic Church and Catholics there.

The Inculturation of the Faith and the Unity of Mankind

The Second Vatican Ecumenical Council (Vatican II, 1962-1965) resulted in many breakthroughs for the whole Church.

One breakthrough was the emphasis on the indigenization and inculturation of local churches in language and personnel. Hong Kong began to use Chinese in place of Latin at Mass in the late 1960s, and Bishop Francis Hsu was ordained the first Chinese bishop of Hong Kong in 1969.

In 1980, I went with over 50 Catholics and another priest to visit the cathedral in Guangzhou, and the parish priest invited us to celebrate a post-Vatican II Mass in Chinese, as he wanted the parish leaders to attend and experience the way we celebrated in Hong Kong.

The first section of the 1965 papal document “Gaudium et Spes: Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” is a good summary to link us up with the whole world and humankind, especially the poor:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.¹

The Catholic Messengers of Green Consciousness

In the 1980s we began to promote care for the ecological environment and in the 1990s established the “Catholic Messengers of Green Consciousness” to promote consciousness for the care for the ecological environment, and basic attitudes and values for action.

The Catholic Messengers of Green Consciousness deeply believes that “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Romans 1:20).

Vision, Standpoint, and Orientation

We deeply believe that each person is basically good in the depths of the heart and soul, and that the cosmos and the earth are imbued with good energy.

God appreciates his creation, loving and cherishing all creatures. (See Genesis 1:1-31).

The Catholic Messengers of Green Consciousness are likewise willing to appreciate nature in loving care, cherishing the nourishment of the Earth, respectful of the cosmic mystery, cherishing life in thankful praise and, in tandem with the evolving of the cosmos, to bring into full play our latent human potential.

We emphasize the wholeness of the person, in the integral union of body, mind, and spirit, giving importance to healthy living and healthy eating, exercise, emotional balance, and meditation with a quiet heart.

We see the basic contradictions and sense of emptiness of present-day people, as a consequence of internal alienation from the self, from other humans, and from the earth, distanced and estranged from our own essence and from the Earth, losing our balance, our value of the self becoming blurred and hazy.

We hope to be specific about reconnecting with ourselves, with others, with God and with the earth, in a macrocosmic union of heaven (God), Earth, and humans; to move from weakening the capacity of the Earth to endure damage, towards protecting the continual cyclic renewal of nature in its ability for unending sustainability.

We wish to hand on a good and healthy environment to our posterity, so that their body, mind, and spirit will have stretching space for reaching out and making multifarious contact with the ecological environment, able to communicate with it and understand it, building a deeper relationship with it in joint growth.

We are hoping that in the coming years, Hong Kong Catholics will have assumed a consciousness for and practice of green environmental protection as the Church’s mainstream orientation, thinking, and agenda; willing to learn and grow together with other green and religious groups and individuals, caring for and placing great importance on the ecological environment, and to become Messengers of Green Consciousness.

Care for Our Common Home

We were overjoyed with the publication in 2015 of Pope Francis’ breakthrough ecological encyclical: “Laudato Si: Care for Our Common Home.” It is a very important encyclical, and what we needed, to spur the whole Church forward to enter concretely into the twenty-first century, to participate with the present-day world to face up to the most serious ecological crisis—the climate change crisis.

The encyclical also emphasized “care for the environment is an essential part of faith.”

In our catechetical teaching, we cannot only mention love of God and man, but need to holistically bring out “love of God, love of humans, and love of the Earth.”

In my view, the Chinese vernacular version of the Our Father needs to be revised as soon as possible to accurately return to the true meaning of the original text: namely, that the will of the Father must be carried out “on earth” (yu di) and not limited to the “human world” (ren jian).²

The Chinese Catholic communities over the whole world need to be awakened for the change to bring out the vision of faith to be broader and more holistic.

Editor’s note: This article was originally written in Chinese and was translated by the ChinaSource team.

1. Pope Paul VI, “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, December 7, 1965” Vatican website, accessed July 5, 2024, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium-et-spes_en.html.
2. Editor’s note: The author is referring to a difference in Chinese versions of the Lord’s Prayer used at different times historically in the Catholic liturgy, or Mass, in Chinese, and he is advocating a return to an earlier usage. In earlier Catholic versions of the Lord’s prayer as well as in the current official Catholic version of the Bible, the Sigao version, the Lord’s prayer is translated, 愿你的旨意承行于地 [may your will be carried out on earth]，如在天上一样 [the same as in heaven]. In the current Chinese Catholic liturgy, however, the text reads, 願你的旨意奉行在人間 [may your will be carried out among humans]，如同在天上 [as in heaven].