From His Lips to God's Ears?

Pope Benedict XVI spoke out on behalf of our "ill-treated world" yesterday in his annual midnight Christmas mass. Benedict evoked the memory of an early father of the church, Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop in what is now Turkey:

What would he say if he could see the state of the world today, through the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation? Man is so preoccupied with himself, he has such an urgent need for all the space and all the time for his own things, that nothing remains for others -- for his neighbor, for the poor, for God. And the richer men become, the more they fill up all the space by themselves.

And we're all the poorer for it. Hats off to Benedict for using his papal pulpit to call on us all to change our wasteful ways. And give the Vatican credit for buying carbon offsets to compensate for its carbon dioxide emissions, too. Will the world's billion Roman Catholics heed their leader's call to end our global gluttony? We can only pray.