Prairie Symposium for the Common Good Keynote Speaker

Monica Marcelli-Chu
Keynote Address Title and Abstract
Care For Our Common Home Through the Spirit’s Gift of Counsel

In the tradition of Catholic social teaching, care for the environment is intimately connected to the question of human labor. Reflecting both the human vocation to participate in the governance of creation, and the inherent dignity of all that is created, the reality of being human and created that grounds moral activity is especially at work in the human-earth relationship. The broader vision of reality that Pope Francis inspires through the concept of integral ecology invites a return to and renewal of this basic relationality. Recognizing the severe ruptures in the human-earth relationship, reflective of a spiritual and cultural crisis that disbands human bonds of affection, Francis calls for solidarity with the earth and the poor.

Grounded in Catholic social teaching and theological reflection on the gifts of the Spirit, I present the Spirit’s gift of counsel as a resource for mediating the human-earth-divine relationality as ordered toward concrete discernment of moral practice in ecological care. In particular, I consider how counsel – as a human practice and divine gift – invites learning from the wisdom of others for the purpose of making concrete decisions. In the context of ecological care as a global task, the gift of counsel supports Pope Francis’s appeal to a globalization that “favours spontaneous cultural interchanges, greater mutual knowledge and processes of integration of peoples,” as he describes in Laudate Deum, as opposed to “a new version of colonialism,” as he notes in Querida Amazonia. Spontaneous cultural interchanges, as inspired by the work of the Creator, transcend a limited contractual horizon as informing exchanges between human communities and the earth, renewing and nurturing a grounded relationality that is human and created.