My message to you on this occasion of the second anniversary of the "Think Clean, Think Green! Campaign" comes in two parts.

    The first is simple and obvious enough. We must protect and preserve the physical world that God created for us to live in, because if we abuse it, we would upset its designated balance which God saw to be good (Gen 1:31). This world will end some day, but while we have it, we must cherish it as a gift from our loving and provident God. There are laws in nature that He has set, and it is within these guidelines that we can achieve dignified human existence while we wait for life after death.

    The second is equally simple, though not quite obvious to many. It is based on this fact: the first and basic human environment where human beings first begin to exist must be given the protection that is due to it. The womb is the most endangered human environment today. We must not be blind to this, for if we allow chemical pollution in this first environment, then our efforts to protect subsequent human environments will prove useless. How can we advocate cleanliness in the external surroundings, if we deliberately introduce foreign and hostile objects into the internal ambience, with the intention of rendering it hostile to new life?

    That is why -- if we are to be integral and consistent in our advocacy -- we must make sure that it is free of pollution and that its mechanisms and the cycles essential to its ecology and habitability are preserved, so that the new life that God designed to begin there -- with the loving cooperation of husband and wife -- may receive the best treatment that "mother nature" can give. This is the integral environmental ethic that is necessary to achieve "one world" and "one family" caring for "one earth". Furthermore, we ought not be neutral before the separation of unborn babies from their rightful nesting place. This separation is the antithesis of the unity we so sincerely seek, for unity is achieved only in love, and love is never neutral. Neutrality hurts the beloved.

    And so, let us not merely think clean, let us truly be clean -- not merely on the outside, but even more so on the inside; we must not move about merely in the physical world, but we must live in the Kingdom of the Spirit. For heaven and earth will pass away, but the words of God will never pass away (cf. Mt 24:23-31).

-- June 5, 1994