CREATION AND CHRISTIAN STEWARDSHIP

The first truth of Christian stewardship is that creation belongs to God.

He creates freely:

• Not from need
• Not from pre-existing matter independent of Him
• Not as one force within the universe
• Not through conflict with another god
• But through wisdom, love, and sovereign goodness

The Creed’s confession of God as Creator establishes:

• The goodness of reality
• The dependence of every creature
• The unity of creation
• The moral accountability of human use
• The final orientation of all things toward God

The earth is not self-owned. Neither an individual, corporation, nation, nor generation possesses absolute authority over it.

Christian stewardship begins in adoration because only the worshiper can receive the world without pretending to be its god.

Jesus Christ is not merely a moral teacher added to an otherwise secular creation.

In Him:

• All things are created.
• All things hold together.
• The visible and invisible worlds receive order.
• Humanity is redeemed.
• Creation moves toward final recapitulation.

This Christological center prevents Franciscan care for creation from becoming vague spirituality.

The lilies, birds, bread, wine, water, wood, human body, work, and seasons belong within the one history of creation and redemption.

The Franciscan loves creatures because they come through Christ and are destined to find their true order under Him.

Genesis repeatedly declares creation good.

Goodness does not mean that every creature has the same purpose or value. Creation contains:

• Mineral, plant, animal, and human life
• Visible and invisible creatures
• Natural processes of growth and decay
• Interdependence
• Hierarchy
• Beauty
• Limits

Diversity reflects divine wisdom. A forest is not valuable only as lumber; nor is lumber use automatically wrong. Moral judgment considers nature, need, sustainability, justice, and the common good.

The created order is neither chaos to be dominated without limit nor a fragile idol that humans may never touch.

Wise stewardship works within the intelligibility and limits of created natures.

The Church teaches creation ex nihilo: God creates from nothing.

This means:

• No matter exists independently of God.
• No creature is self-sufficient.
• Creation is a radical gift.
• God remains present as sustaining cause.
• Creatures possess real causal powers received from Him.

Divine action does not compete with natural causes. Rain can be explained meteorologically and still received as a gift of Providence.

Scientific explanation does not make God unnecessary because science studies created processes; it does not explain why anything exists at all or why created causes possess being and intelligibility.

Continual dependence produces humility. Every breath, harvest, tool, animal, body, and moment exists by received being.

The human person has a unique place in visible creation.

Created in God’s image, the human being possesses:

• A spiritual and immortal soul
• Intellect
• Freedom
• Moral responsibility
• Capacity for communion
• A vocation to know and love God
• Authority and responsibility toward creation

This dignity belongs to every person:

• Unborn and born
• Healthy and disabled
• Rich and poor
• Young and elderly
• Citizen and migrant
• Conscious and unconscious

Human uniqueness should not become arrogance. The image-bearer is called to represent God’s wise care, not imitate a tyrant.

The creature with the greatest earthly dignity bears the greatest earthly responsibility.

Genesis grants humanity dominion over other living creatures. The word should not be erased, but it must be interpreted through the whole biblical revelation.

Christ exercises lordship through:

• Truth
• Service
• Sacrifice
• Mercy
• Justice
• Care for the weak

Human dominion therefore includes:

• Cultivation
• Protection
• Knowledge
• Use for legitimate needs
• Restraint
• Planning
• Accountability

To exercise dominion well is to ask what a decision does to people, animals, land, water, future generations, and the common good.

Stewardship is authority beneath God, not ownership without limits.

Genesis places the human person in the garden to work and guard it.

Work and care belong together.

Work without care can become:

• Exploitation
• Exhaustion of soil
• Pollution
• Waste
• Short-term profit at long-term cost

Care without work can become:

• Romantic distance from real human needs
• Contempt for farmers, miners, builders, or workers
• Refusal to make prudent use of resources
• Dependence upon unseen labor

The vocation is cultivation: to bring created potential into responsible fruitfulness while respecting limits.

A garden is neither untouched wilderness nor an industrial machine. It is a place of intelligent cooperation with created order.

Sin damages every relationship.

Its ecological expressions can include:

• Greed
• Waste
• Domination
• Corruption
• Indifference
• Dishonest data
• Consumerism
• Exploitation of workers
• Refusal of responsibility

Natural disasters are not always direct punishments for particular sins. The fallen world includes suffering, decay, and physical danger beyond simple moral formulas.

Human choices can still increase or reduce vulnerability through building practices, preparedness, corruption, land use, infrastructure, and care for poor communities.

Ecological conversion begins by admitting both structural and personal sin without pretending that one household choice explains every crisis.

Franciscan tradition often speaks of creation as a book, mirror, sign, or vestige of God.

This means creatures can awaken:

• Wonder
• Praise
• Knowledge by analogy
• Gratitude
• Humility
• Desire for God

Creation is not a sacrament in the same sense as Baptism or the Eucharist. The seven sacraments were instituted by Christ as efficacious signs of grace.

A sunrise does not confer sacramental grace simply by being beautiful. Yet beauty can dispose the heart to prayer and reveal the intelligibility of the Creator’s work.

The sacramental vision preserves both distinction and relation: creation is not God, but it is never meaningless before God.

The Canticle opens by declaring that praise, glory, honor, and blessing belong to the Most High.

Francis then praises God through:

• Brother Sun
• Sister Moon and the stars
• Brother Wind and weather
• Sister Water
• Brother Fire
• Sister Mother Earth
• Those who forgive and endure in peace
• Sister Bodily Death

The poem is cosmic and moral. It does not stop with landscapes. Human forgiveness, suffering, peace, and death belong within praise.

The Canticle’s final movement calls all to praise and serve God with great humility.

Creation care separated from forgiveness, humility, and service would miss the Canticle’s full spiritual architecture.

The sun gives light and bears a likeness to divine splendor, but it is not a god.

The moon and stars are:

• Created
• Beautiful
• Ordered
• Signs of times and seasons
• Objects of scientific study
• Invitations to praise

Francis’s language reverses ancient idolatry. Celestial bodies are members of the creaturely household, not rulers of human destiny.

Astrology assigns personal fate or spiritual power to celestial positions. This is incompatible with Christian trust in Providence and human freedom.

Astronomy, by contrast, studies the heavens through reason and can deepen wonder.

The Christian looks upward not to discover fate but to praise the Maker.

Francis praises water as useful, humble, precious, and chaste. He praises fire as beautiful, joyful, strong, and powerful. Earth sustains and governs, producing fruits, flowers, and herbs.

These creatures reveal both gift and limit:

• Water sustains life and can flood.
• Fire warms and can destroy.
• Earth feeds and can be exhausted.
• Weather supports life and can become dangerous.

Stewardship respects created power rather than romanticizing it.

Access to safe water, clean air, fertile soil, and secure shelter is closely connected to human dignity.

The household of creation calls for gratitude, engineering, conservation, preparedness, justice, and humility before forces humans do not fully control.

The Canticle praises God through those who forgive for love of Him and endure sickness and trial in peace.

This verse joins ecology to moral conversion. A person cannot praise the harmony of nature while cultivating hatred, revenge, or domination.

Francis later welcomes bodily death as sister because:

• Death belongs to the creaturely condition after the fall.
• Christ has entered and conquered death.
• The body will rise.
• The faithful can die in God’s will.

Calling death sister does not make suicide, euthanasia, or neglect of life acceptable.

Christians preserve life, relieve suffering, use proportionate care, and hope in the Resurrection.

Francis is remembered in connection with birds, lambs, fish, rabbits, worms, bees, and other creatures.

The sermon to the birds appears in early biographical sources and portrays Francis calling creatures to praise their Creator.

The wolf of Gubbio appears especially in the later Little Flowers of St. Francis. It teaches peace and restored relationship in story form, but it should not be treated as though every detail were documented by the earliest witnesses.

These stories reveal:

• Wonder
• Gentleness
• Preaching of praise
• Restraint from cruelty
• Kinship under God
• Concern for peace

They do not teach that wildlife is harmless or should be handled without expertise.

Animals are God’s creatures and should be treated according to their natures.

Legitimate human uses can include:

• Food
• Clothing
• Work
• Transportation
• Medicine and proportionate research
• Companionship
• Conservation

Moral limits exclude:

• Needless suffering
• Cruel entertainment
• Neglect
• Wasteful killing
• Irresponsible breeding
• Abandonment

Human life remains categorically different. Animal experimentation, farming, veterinary decisions, and wildlife management require competent ethical judgment rather than slogans.

Kindness to animals should deepen, not replace, responsibility toward human beings.

Companion animals can provide affection, assistance, routine, safety, and joy.

Responsible care includes:

• Food and water
• Veterinary care
• Training
• Safe housing
• Legal compliance
• Protection of neighbors and wildlife
• Planning for illness, travel, and death

A pet is not a human person. It cannot receive Baptism, Confession, Holy Communion, or Christian burial as a human being does.

Grief at an animal’s death can be sincere and should not be mocked. Yet expenditure upon animals should remain proportionate to duties toward human family members and the poor.

Veterinary euthanasia to prevent otherwise unrelieved animal suffering is not morally identical to euthanasia of a human person.

The Church may bless animals and those who care for them.

A blessing:

• Addresses God
• Gives thanks
• Asks protection
• Reminds humans of stewardship
• Uses an approved liturgical form where required

The animal does not receive a sacrament. A blessing is not magic, insurance, or a substitute for veterinary care, training, vaccination, containment, or lawful responsibility.

Parish animal blessings should consider:

• Safety
• Allergies
• Animal stress
• Sanitation
• Separation of incompatible animals
• Accessibility

The feast of St. Francis offers an occasion for gratitude and catechesis, not spectacle or confusion about human and animal dignity.

Food joins creation, labor, culture, family, and thanksgiving.

Christian stewardship supports:

• Respect for farmers and workers
• Humane treatment of animals
• Soil and water care
• Food safety
• Reduction of avoidable waste
• Access to adequate nutrition
• Gratitude before meals

Hunting and fishing can be legitimate for food, management, livelihood, or culture when conducted lawfully, safely, and without cruelty or waste.

Vegetarian or reduced-meat practices may be chosen for health, penance, economics, or stewardship, but Catholic doctrine does not require all persons to abstain permanently from animal food.

Dietary choices should respect health, pregnancy, disability, culture, income, and medical advice.

Wild creatures possess value within the created order and within ecosystems humans often only partly understand.

Responsible action may include:

• Protecting habitats
• Controlling invasive species prudently
• Reducing unnecessary poisoning
• Supporting lawful conservation
• Avoiding illegal wildlife trade
• Using native planting where suitable
• Respecting seasonal restrictions

Wildlife management can require difficult choices, including population control, habitat intervention, or protection of human communities.

Sentiment alone cannot decide technical questions. Competent ecology, veterinary science, agriculture, public safety, and local knowledge should inform judgment.

The Franciscan attitude combines tenderness with realism about created natures.

All creation is good, but not every creature is a person.

Human dignity requires protection of:

• Unborn children
• Mothers and fathers
• Children
• Disabled persons
• The sick and dying
• Workers
• Migrants and refugees
• Indigenous and rural communities
• Victims of pollution and war

Environmental language becomes anti-human when it portrays persons, fertility, disability, or poor populations as burdens to be eliminated.

Human priority does not justify destruction. It establishes the moral agent responsible for wise care.

The human person is not outside nature, but neither is the person merely one animal among others.

Integral ecology sees relationships among:

• God
• The human person
• Family
• Society
• Work
• Economics
• Culture
• Institutions
• Animals
• Land, water, air, and climate

It rejects fragmented solutions. A policy may reduce one harm while imposing another upon workers, families, or poor regions.

Integral judgment asks:

• Who benefits?
• Who pays?
• What evidence supports the action?
• What alternatives exist?
• What happens over time?
• Are local communities heard?
• Is human dignity protected?

The Franciscan family contributes the spiritual virtues of gratitude, minority, fraternity, penance, peace, and praise.

Poor communities often have fewer resources to avoid or recover from:

• Polluted water
• Unsafe air
• Toxic waste
• Extreme weather
• Crop failure
• Dangerous work
• Displacement
• Inadequate infrastructure

Christian stewardship therefore includes:

• Emergency relief
• Safe housing
• Clean water
• Worker protection
• Public health
• Resilient infrastructure
• Honest consultation
• Just compensation

The poor should not be used as images for fundraising without consent or as arguments for policies they had no role in shaping.

Franciscan minority listens before speaking for another person.

Human ecology recognizes that persons flourish within moral, relational, and cultural environments.

It includes respect for:

• The body as created gift
• Marriage and family
• Children and intergenerational responsibility
• Work and rest
• Community and belonging
• Culture and memory
• Religious freedom
• Care of the vulnerable

A society cannot claim ecological health while treating unborn life, disabled persons, elderly people, workers, or families as disposable.

Neither can it defend family life while tolerating poisoned neighborhoods, exploitative labor, or indifference to future generations.

Created human nature and created environmental order deserve integrated respect.

The Church recognizes the right to private property. It supports responsibility, family stability, initiative, work, and freedom.

This right is not absolute. Ownership carries duties toward:

• Family
• Workers
• Neighbors
• The poor
• The community
• Future generations
• Creation

A landowner may use land, but not poison another person’s water without moral responsibility. A business may produce goods, but not treat fines as a license for harm. A government may regulate, but should respect subsidiarity, property, due process, and the burdens placed upon citizens.

Stewardship seeks ordered possession rather than abolition of ownership or absolute possession.

The natural sciences study measurable aspects of creation.

Good scientific practice includes:

• Observation
• Hypothesis
• Measurement
• Replication
• Peer criticism
• Revision
• Clear acknowledgment of uncertainty

Faith contributes truths science cannot establish through experiment:

• Creation is gift.
• God is Creator.
• Human persons possess moral dignity.
• Stewardship has ethical obligations.
• Creation has a final fulfillment in Christ.

The scientist does not become infallible by expertise, and the theologian should not pronounce on technical data without competence.

Humility allows evidence, moral principles, and prudential judgment to cooperate.

The Church has repeatedly called Catholics to take environmental and climate risks seriously, especially where the poor and future generations are affected.

Moral response requires:

• Accurate evidence
• Honest communication
• Proportionate action
• Fair distribution of burdens
• Attention to adaptation and resilience
• International cooperation where appropriate
• Respect for subsidiarity
• Protection of workers and poor households

Catholics may disagree about particular taxes, technologies, timelines, regulations, subsidies, or treaties.

Prudential disagreement does not justify:

• Falsifying data
• Dismissing all risk
• Using fear to manipulate
• Treating opponents as enemies
• Ignoring unintended consequences

The common good requires patient truth rather than ideological reflex.

Energy enables heating, cooling, health care, transportation, food production, communication, education, and economic life.

Responsible energy policy considers:

• Reliability
• Affordability
• Pollution
• Safety
• Land and water use
• Waste
• Worker conditions
• National and local circumstances
• Long-term consequences

No technology is morally sufficient merely because it is new or labeled green. Mining, manufacturing, disposal, labor, and supply chains also matter.

Technology is a human good when governed by truth and the common good. It becomes technocratic when technical capacity is treated as the final measure of what should be done.

Franciscan simplicity asks whether innovation serves persons or possesses them.

Businesses shape creation through production, transport, employment, energy, land, waste, design, and investment.

Corporate stewardship includes:

• Obeying just law
• Telling the truth
• Protecting workers
• Preventing avoidable pollution
• Accounting for long-term costs
• Designing durable goods
• Using resources efficiently
• Repairing harm
• Serving customers honestly

Profit is legitimate and necessary for many enterprises. It becomes disordered when short-term gain externalizes grave costs onto workers, neighbors, or future generations.

Environmental claims in marketing should be specific and verifiable. “Green” branding without real change is a form of deception.

Franciscan business ethics joins enterprise, creativity, justice, and restraint.

Some environmental problems exceed the capacity of individuals and require public action.

Good policy should:

• Use competent evidence
• Define the problem clearly
• Respect legitimate rights
• Assign responsibility proportionately
• Avoid corruption
• Measure outcomes
• Allow revision
• Protect poor households and workers
• Respect local competence where possible

Subsidiarity resists unnecessary central control. Solidarity resists abandonment of problems that no local community can solve alone.

Catholics can advocate firmly without turning prudential proposals into articles of faith.

Political charity requires moral principles, factual honesty, and respect for persons who disagree.

A household can practice stewardship through small, stable acts.

Possibilities include:

• Reducing food waste
• Using water carefully
• Maintaining appliances
• Choosing durable goods
• Combining trips when reasonable
• Recycling according to local systems
• Sharing or donating useful items
• Planting appropriately
• Teaching children gratitude
• Supporting responsible businesses

Household practices should respect:

• Disability
• Health
• Climate
• Housing restrictions
• Income
• Safety
• Family size
• Work demands

One family’s visible practice should not become a weapon for judging another family whose circumstances differ.

Waste can reveal ingratitude, poor design, excessive consumption, or structural inefficiency.

Franciscan restraint encourages:

• Repair when safe and economical
• Reuse when hygienic and suitable
• Donation of genuinely useful goods
• Recycling according to actual capacity
• Safe disposal of medicines, chemicals, batteries, and electronics
• Avoidance of unnecessary packaging

Keeping every object is not stewardship. Broken, contaminated, unsafe, or unusable goods may need proper disposal.

Donation should not transfer trash or expense to poor communities.

Compulsive saving, hoarding disorder, contamination fears, or severe guilt about disposal may require professional help.

The purpose is grateful order, not environmental scrupulosity.

Water, air, and soil are common goods essential to life.

Stewardship includes:

• Preventing avoidable contamination
• Maintaining infrastructure
• Monitoring public risks honestly
• Protecting workers
• Cleaning up harm
• Providing safe access
• Planning for drought, flood, and fire

Pollution is not merely an aesthetic issue. It can affect pregnancy, childhood development, respiratory health, agriculture, housing, work, and migration.

Technical standards require competent science and lawful authority. Moral principles require truth, justice, and special concern for those least able to protect themselves.

Francis’s praise of water should become gratitude joined to practical care.

Catholic institutions can integrate stewardship into mission.

Prudent practices may include:

• Energy and water audits
• Maintenance plans
• Safe grounds management
• Waste reduction
• Responsible purchasing
• Formation rooted in Catholic doctrine
• Emergency preparedness
• Care for employees
• Transparent budgeting
• Service of poor neighborhoods

A parish should not spend heavily on symbolic environmental projects while neglecting unsafe buildings, unjust wages, sacramental ministry, or people in immediate need.

Neither should ordinary pastoral demands become an excuse for permanent waste or neglect.

Stewardship belongs within worship, finances, education, facilities, and charity.

Creation can help the heart become attentive.

Helpful practices include:

• Praying Psalm 18 outdoors
• Giving thanks for weather and seasons
• Contemplating a creature’s order and beauty
• Walking in silence
• Interceding for farmers, workers, and disaster victims
• Ending with a concrete act of stewardship

Prayer outdoors should remain safe and proportionate. Weather, terrain, wildlife, disability, medication, hydration, and local rules matter.

Nature solitude is not a substitute for Sunday Mass, the sacraments, or ecclesial communion.

The created world becomes prayerful when it leads beyond itself to the Father through Christ.

Bread and wine come from creation and human labor. At Mass they are offered and become, through consecration, the Body and Blood of Christ.

The Eucharist teaches:

• Creation is gift.
• Human work can be offered.
• Christ transforms without destroying creaturely signs.
• Thanksgiving is the proper response to gift.
• Communion creates responsibility toward the poor.

The Mass is not an environmental ritual. It is the sacramental re-presentation of Christ’s one sacrifice.

Yet Eucharistic faith has ecological consequences because one cannot adore the Creator-made-flesh while treating His gifts with contempt.

Eucharistic stewardship begins in worship and ends in charity.

God’s rest after creation reveals completion, blessing, and holy order. The Lord’s Day celebrates Christ’s Resurrection and the new creation.

Rest protects:

• Worship
• Family
• Human dignity
• Workers
• Gratitude
• Freedom from endless production
• Enjoyment of creation

A culture that never rests treats persons and earth as machines.

Sunday observance does not remove necessary works of mercy, health care, public safety, hospitality, or essential service.

Employers and institutions should still respect reasonable rest and the religious duties of workers.

Rest is ecological because it accepts limits and receives the world as gift rather than raw material.

The liturgy receives creation through:

• Water
• Oil
• Bread and wine
• Fire and light
• Incense
• Seasons
• Fasts and feasts
• Blessings of fields, animals, and harvests

Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Rogation customs, harvest thanksgiving, and the feasts of saints can form stewardship.

The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation on September 1 offers an occasion for prayer and conversion.

Popular devotions should follow liturgical norms and avoid political appropriation of worship.

The liturgical year teaches that created time belongs to Christ and moves toward fulfillment in Him.

Christian hope awaits:

• The resurrection of the body
• The defeat of death
• The judgment of God
• The new heavens and new earth
• The full communion of the saints
• Creation’s final order under Christ

The new creation is God’s gift, not the automatic product of progress.

This hope does not excuse neglect. Because creation has a destiny in Christ, present stewardship matters.

The Christian avoids both despair and utopianism. No ecological failure can defeat God’s promise, and no human program can replace redemption.

Ecological conversion brings care for creation into Christian repentance.

It can include:

• Confessing waste, greed, indifference, or dishonesty
• Repairing harm
• Changing consumption
• Supporting just policies
• Learning from science and local knowledge
• Serving affected communities
• Giving thanks
• Recovering wonder

Conversion is personal and communal. An individual cannot repair an entire system, and institutions cannot replace personal virtue.

The sacraments remain central. Ecological conversion is not a new sacrament or separate gospel. It is one dimension of turning to Christ and living charity.

The sure fruit is greater love of God, neighbor, and creation in proper order.

Concern for creation can become emotionally overwhelming.

Warning signs include:

• Persistent panic
• Inability to function
• Compulsive checking
• Severe guilt over ordinary necessities
• Contempt for people with different circumstances
• Hoarding or unsafe reuse
• Despair about having children or a future
• Suicidal thoughts

Healthy responses may include:

• Prayer
• Reliable information in limited amounts
• Concrete local action
• Community support
• Rest
• Psychotherapy
• Medical care
• A trusted confessor for scrupulosity

No individual bears the whole world. Immediate danger or suicidal intention requires prompt professional or emergency assistance.

Christian hope permits responsibility without despair.

Wildfire, flood, storm, drought, earthquake, industrial accident, and other disasters require preparation and solidarity.

Prudent preparation includes:

• Emergency plans
• Reliable alerts
• Medication and essential supplies
• Accessible evacuation
• Plans for children, elderly persons, disabled persons, and animals
• Coordination with lawful authorities
• Protection from fraud
• Post-disaster pastoral care

Prayer does not replace evacuation or safety instructions. Neither should emergency policy ignore people who lack transportation, documents, money, language access, or secure housing.

Franciscan fraternity acts before, during, and after disaster through preparation, relief, presence, rebuilding, and prayer.

Environmental information can be accurate, uncertain, exaggerated, misleading, or deliberately false.

Before sharing a claim, ask:

• What is the original source?
• Is it current?
• Does it distinguish evidence from prediction?
• Are numbers given in context?
• What expertise is required?
• Who funds or benefits from the message?
• Are contrary data addressed fairly?
• Does the proposed remedy follow from the evidence?

Spiritual warnings are needed when a movement:

• Divinizes nature
• Despises humanity
• Uses fear for control
• Treats policy as revelation
• Rejects moral limits
• Turns Francis into a partisan mascot

Truthful stewardship welcomes correction.

Daily

• Praise God for one created gift.
• Avoid one act of needless waste.
• Care well for something entrusted to you.
• Remember one person affected by environmental hardship.

Weekly

• Spend a period in prayerful attention to creation.
• Repair, reuse, share, or dispose responsibly of one item.
• Review one household practice without shame or comparison.
• Perform one work of mercy.

Monthly

• Review energy, water, food, transportation, or purchasing habits.
• Support one trustworthy local initiative.
• Learn from one competent source.
• Pray for workers, farmers, scientists, leaders, and poor communities.

Annually

• Choose one structural improvement suited to means and vocation.
• Review emergency plans and care for dependents.

The rule should remain realistic, hopeful, and subordinate to higher duties.

Modern life can separate people from the sources of food, energy, water, materials, waste, and labor.

It can also create:

• Consumerism
• Technocratic control
• Environmental degradation
• Disconnection from place
• Fear
• Political polarization
• Contempt for limits

Franciscan spirituality offers:

• Praise instead of possession
• Gratitude instead of entitlement
• Minority instead of domination
• Stewardship instead of exploitation
• Science joined to moral wisdom
• Human dignity instead of anti-human ideology
• Hope instead of panic
• Christ instead of nature worship

The world needs more than environmental branding. It needs converted persons, truthful institutions, competent science, just economies, merciful communities, and worship of the Creator.

The practice is bearing trustworthy fruit when it produces:

• Worship of God alone
• Love for Jesus Christ
• Gratitude for created goods
• Respect for human life
• Concern for poor communities
• Kindness toward animals
• Scientific honesty
• Prudent use of resources
• Responsible consumption
• Repair and maintenance
• Reduction of needless waste
• Fair treatment of workers
• Transparent institutions
• Care for land, water, and air
• Respect for legitimate property
• Subsidiarity and solidarity
• Freedom from pantheism and superstition
• Freedom from panic and scrupulosity
• Hope in the Resurrection
• Praise of the Creator

Warning signs include contempt for humanity, nature worship, scientific dishonesty, ideological fear, cruel treatment of animals, neglect of the poor, waste disguised as convenience, unsafe austerity, compulsive guilt, and use of St. Francis as a partisan symbol.

Healthy stewardship makes the creature transparent to the Creator without erasing the creature’s proper goodness.