Final press release

 

Numerous monks and nuns were present at the conference; they came from Orthodox monasteries (Greece, Russia, Mount Sinai, Armenia, France, England, United States) and Catholic and Reformed monasteries (Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary).

In four days of meetings and discussions open to the public theologians, patrologists, and scholars examined under various aspects the theological and spiritual dimensions of man’s relationship with the environment that surrounds him, asking what values might inspire responsible choices in face of the ecological crisis provoked by man himself, which is causing irreversible wounds on life on our planet.

On opening day the talks by the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi, and by the metropolitan of Pergamum, Ioannis Zizioulas, delegate of patriarch Bartholomew to the conference, pointed out how in the Christian conception the creation is a work of the Trinity and how man is called upon not only to preserve the environment in which he lives, but also to be, in his condition of co-creature, “priest of creation”, in order to offer it to God, awaiting the salvation of all creation, animate and inanimate. Because of this, at the heart of the ecological commitment we find a spiritual problem. “The earth is desolate when the quality of human life and of cosmic life declines,” observed Enzo Bianchi. The teaching of the Orthodox Church on ecological problems was then illustrated by bishop Amvrosij of Gat?ina, rector of the St Petersburg Theological Academy and head of the official delegation of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The goodness of creation according to the Biblical account (Gen 1,31), the relation between wounded and restored nature and the history of salvation (Rom 8,22), the church fathers’ understanding of the relationship between man and creation, from Ireneus of Lyons to Maximus the Confessor to the Syriac fathers, were at the center of the reflections offered by John Behr (New York), Nestor Kavvadas (Tübingen), Assaad Elias Kattan (Münster).

Asceticism and poverty of the monastic tradition are an occasion for reflecting on respect for the earth and the sharing of its fruits in a consumer society. The round table presided by bishop Andrej of Remesiana, delegate of the Holy Synod of the Serbian Orthodox Church, gathered the different perspectives given by the monastic tradition in its relations with the environment: from contemplation of nature in Byzantine literature and tradition (Antonio Rigo, member of the scientific committee, Venice; Dimitrios Moschos, Athens) to the transformations of the natural space in the monastic settlements of the Russian North (archimandrite Porfirij Šutov of Solovki, igumen Mitrofan Badanin of Varzuga) or in Cistercian abbeys in the West (Esther De Waal, Rowlestone, Herefordshire).