Would Christ have wept?
March 22nd 2009 20:48
The spectacled eider duck
Mary Colwell is a Catholic lay activist and environmentalist. About 15 years ago she went deep into the Arctic to film the spectacled eider duck, a rare species which lives all year round above the Arctic Circle. While other birds fly south for winter, it spends the dark months, as Colwell describes it, "sitting in the middle of the frozen Baring Sea".
It is an inspiring creature.
In filming the spectacled eider, Colwell stayed on a remote Arctic island favoured as a breeding ground. She captured images of a female brood with her clutch of eggs, and later filmed the ducklings waddling into the Arctic Ocean, the start of an isolated life free of some of the more disturbing influences of the planet, such as humans.
A few years later, Colwell telephoned the man who owned the island to ask how the ducks were doing, and was deeply shaken by his terrible response. During a check on the four females that regularly nest on his island, he had found all four had been shot sitting on the nest. The bodies had not been taken for food; neither had feathers or eggs been removed. The mothers, sitting on their eggs, had been shot for sport.
Colwell writes, "I put the phone down and wept, not just for the wickedness of the people who had carried out this callous act of violence but for the senseless loss of magnificent creatures."
Since then, Mary Colwell has been posing a question to everyone from lay Catholics to Church leaders. The question is this, "If Christ had been walking over that island and found those dead ducks, would he have wept? Not just for the people who had killed animals, but for the loss of the ducks themselves?"
Overwhelmingly, she says, the answer to that question from the lay community is “yes”, but the hierarchy is split, with many saying, “No, Christ wouldn’t weep over that which is not human.”
. o O o .
This story is a small part of an article about broader environmental issues generally and, particularly, the World Social Forum highlighting the Amazon’s diversity, held in Brazil on January 27 to February 1 this year. The full article can be read here.
Image: www.ducks.org and www.garykramer.net
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