On the second day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Pope Francis met with a Delegation of Buddhist monks from Cambodia.
Your Holiness, this is my great honor to be allowed to have a meeting today.
To pay respect and to make our friendship closer and I hope that our meeting today will bring peace.
The theme of the meeting was “Ecological Conversion”—a theme that is dear to the Pope's heart. He described the topic as important due to the “grave threats” “our human family and our planet” are facing.
POPE FRANCIS
This meeting is truly a positive sign of the growing sensitivity and concern for the welfare of the Earth, our common home, and for the important contributions that, inspired by your religious beliefs and spiritual traditions, you can offer to your noble country on its path to social healing and economic reconstruction following the socio-political crises of recent decades.
Pope Francis also emphasized that caring for the Earth, whether Buddhist or Christian, is essential to protecting man's common home for the future. He believes that working together can bring about ecological change.
POPE FRANCIS
Dialogue reveals the deep richness our respective religious traditions offer in support of efforts to cultivate ecological responsibility.
For their part, Christians fulfill their ecological responsibility when, as trusted stewards, they protect creation, the work that God entrusted to man to cultivate and guard.
At the end of the meeting, the delegation gave Pope Francis a silver platter with an image of Angkor Wat, believed to be the largest religious monument in the world. The Pope also received a golden vase used for baptisms.
KG
