(ANS) – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ emotional speech during COP26 highlights the urgency of the climate situation. “Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice:  Either we stop it — or it stops us. It is time to say enough! Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature as a toilet. Enough of burning, drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves. Our planet is changing before our eyes — from the ocean depths to mountain tops… we are still careening towards climate catastrophe.” This plundering seems to be never-ending. The wound, a systematic assault on the Earth, breaks down the balance of the planet. The bleeding wounds on Mother Earth creates a sense of brokenness in us. Leave out the greedy, the humans, in general, feel a state of hopelessness and helplessness with regard to the deterioration of the health of the planet. The worship of mammon now seems to have engulfed the entire planet. The struggle for power and control has reached new heights in our time. We, humans, keep looking with hope for the reversal of what had happened to the natural world.   

(ANS) – We live in a ‘throw away’ world that seems to spin around two axes [plural of axis], namely the unquenchable desire for ‘more’ and the apparently ‘insatiable yearning for ‘new’. We, as human beings, want to have more and more and more of what we think will make us comfortable. And yet at the same time, nothing satisfies us for long. What seemed to make us very happy just a few days ago no longer excites us and we yearn for something ‘new’ [we don’t know what] that will satisfy us.

(ANS – New Rochelle) – In the Declaration of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, sport’s role in social progress is acknowledged: “Sport is also an important enabler of sustainable development. We recognize the growing contribution of sport to the realization of development and peace in its promotion of tolerance and respect and the contributions it makes to the empowerment of women and of young people, individuals and communities as well as to health, education and social inclusion objectives.” So, for the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace, which is celebrated each year on April 6, “Salesian Missions”, the U.S. development arm of the Salesians of Don Bosco, highlights sports programs in countries around the globe.