Ramblings from Father Frank Corbishley

            Recently I was listening to a discussion about the U.S. automobile industry on On Point, an NPR show.  Evidently the U.S. auto industry is slowly crawling back from the abyss.  11 million cars were sold in the most recent reporting year.  That’s about one million cars more than the previous year, but still a far cry from the 17 million sold just before the current recession began.  One industry analyst stated that people weren’t rushing back into the market but were “tiptoeing back into the market, only buying cars when they have to.”  I thought to myself, “Why else would anyone buy a car?  Because they’re bored?  Because they’ve tired of their current car?”

            About 350,000 jobs were lost in the auto industry in this current recession.  About 50,000 of those have come back in the slow recovery.  My heart goes out to the 300,000 net unemployed.  For them, this recession isn’t something they read about in the paper; it’s a real personal and family crisis.  But I also think about those extra six million cars:  how much steel does it take to make 6 million cars?  How much aluminum?  How much of these minerals does the planet have?  If we maintain our current excessive rates of consumption, or if we revert to our prior even more excessive rates of consumption, ¿can the planet sustain it? 

            For good or ill, God put us humans in charge of this planet God created.  We are the stewards of God’s creation.  Too often we behave as if we are the owners, to the exclusion of the Creator and to the exclusion of the generations that come after us.  Somehow we have to find a balance between the immediate needs of people to have jobs and the long-term needs of the human race to have a habitable planet.  I don’t have any quick answers to these conundrums, but I am convinced that as Christians we must wrestle with these issues and not continue blindly in our old habits of consumption.  To a large degree we seem to have shifted the focus of our identity from the verb “To Be” to the verb “To Have.”  It’s a sad exchange.  God has better aspirations for us.

Father Frank +