Magistero Sociale. Dialogo, educazione

Since the quality of human existence is influenced-facilitated or hindered-by the environment, culture and education received, as well as by the conditioning of social structures, attention to ecological choices becomes an essential factor in building a quality of natural life that is according to "truth and goodness," that is, in conformity with the creaturely realization of human life. The relationship of the person with the natural world is, therefore, a constitutive element of Christian identity: it is a relationship that is the fruit and expression of the divine's plan of love for the human, invested with the responsibility to cooperate with and protect the nature entrusted to him or her. For Christian ethics and anthropology, therefore, the ecological question gravitates around the concept of the dignity of being a "person": the defense of nature and the defense of the human being constitute a unity of principle in a personalist and anthropocentric perspective, since natural life is protected when it is human life that is protected.