Pope Pleads for Right to a Safe Environment

Pope John Paul II called today for a global commitment to save the Earth from ecological devastation and said a safe environment should be part of a new Charter of Human Rights.

In the first papal document exclusively devoted to ecology, the Pope declared that the root cause of environmental problems in industrialized countries was greed, selfishness and disregard for nature.

He said the issue “lays bare the depth of man’s moral crisis.” Its only lasting solution was to abandon a life style of “instant gratification.”

His remarks were contained in a 12-page message called “Peace with God the Creator, Peace with All of Creation,” issued for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Peace Jan. 1.

The message, the Pope’s most powerful remarks ever on the environment, included issues such as deforestation, fossil fuels, industrial waste and the ozone layer.

The yearly peace message, sent to world organizations and heads of state, was printed in Russian for the first time. The Pope met Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev last Friday.

The pontiff said industrialized countries had no right to demand restrictive environmental standards from developing countries unless they first applied those standards themselves.

There has been heated debate between advanced countries and the Third World over issues such as deforestation and the use of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Using technical language not usually found in church documents, the Pope said the depletion of the ozone layer and the resulting “greenhouse effect” had reached crisis proportions because of industrial growth and vastly increased energy needs.

Scientists say that unless there is a halt to the erosion of the ozone layer, which filters out the sun’s harmful rays, the polar ice caps could melt.

A safe environment “is ever more insistently presented today as a right that must be included in an updated Charter of Human Rights,” he said in a reference to the 40-year-old U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.