A Mass for Rain: A Cry to God
MEXICO – In normal times, Lake Chapala provides drinking water for 12 million residents of Guadalajara and Mexico City. The record drought that triggered devastating forest fires in Mexico has shrunk the lake’s average surface area by 20 percent and its average depth from 32 to less than 10 feet. Lake Chapala, which once covered 400 sq. miles, has lost one-third of its volume and continues to shrink by 74 acres a day.

“This drought is not an act of God,” Juan Cardinal Sandoval Iñiguez has told his fellow Catholics, it is “the first evidence of global warming changing historic weather patterns…. [It] is also a divine sign that society is on the wrong path.”

On June 28, half-a-million people converged on Lake Chapala’s shrinking shores where Cardinal Sandoval Iñiguez led a special Mass and a day-long prayer for rain.

Carlos Agnesi, president of Guadalajara’s Cruz Verde (Green Cross), one of the event coordinators, declared that the Mass for Rain would be followed by “as nationwide program to get churches involved in environmental concerns.” The Interreligious Council of Mexico’s (ICM) 1999 Congress will be dedicated to mobilizing every church in Mexico “in the cause of environmental protection,” by emphasizing “lifestyle change and the importance of appropriate technology.”

When half a million people flock to the shores of a dying lake to ask for God’s help, “it shows the urgency of the deepening problem of global weather change,” says Fred Kruger, coordinator of ICM’s North American office [409 Mendocino Ave., No. A, Santa Rosa, CA 95401, (707) 573- 3162, fax: 578-7702]. The message of the Mass for Rain is clear, Kruger states. “We either make changes in our consumer-oriented lifestyle and end our destructive impact upon the global atmosphere, or we continue to foul the atmosphere… and create conditions which will have destructive impact upon our children, our grandchildren and the whole of civilization in the next decades.”

While churches, synagogues, temples and mosques have been stewards of society’s moral values, Kruger said, “they have been ‘asleep at the switch’… [for failing] to address the moral and ethical issues surrounding climate change and global warming.”

Believing that places of worship “remain society’s last best hope” for addressing environmental collapse, ICM advocates that spiritual communities must begin to address the issue of “creation care.”