Consumerism is a Virus – Pope Francis         

The Lord comes and invites us to go to Him, but some say “no” to His invitation.

All people could think about then was eating and drinking. In other words, said the Pope, “they reduced their lives to their needs, they were content with a flat, horizontal life, without momentum.” They were content to consume.

Pope Francis described consumerism as “a virus that attacks the faith at the roots”, because it makes us believe that life depends only on what we have, so we forget about God. “Even if the Lord comes, you just follow the appetites that come to you”, he said. The real danger is that which anesthetizes the heart, added the Pope, letting ourselves be burdened and dissipated by our needs.

Things are never enough, said Pope Francis. “Our houses are filled with things but empty of children”, he said. “This is the demographic winter we are suffering”, he added. We have no time for God or for others. Our greed grows and others become obstacles, so we end up feeling threatened, always dissatisfied and angry, raising the level of hatred.

“We see it today where consumerism reigns”, said Pope Francis: “The world is full of weapons that cause death, yet we do not realize that we too continue to arm our hearts with anger.”

Jesus wants to awaken us, continued the Pope, with the verb "to watch". In order to keep watch, we must have hope that the night will not last forever, that dawn will soon come.

“We must overcome the temptation that the meaning of life is accumulation”, he said. We must “resist the dazzling lights of consumption, which will shine everywhere this month.” Prayer and charity, he added, are truly “the greatest of treasures.”

When we open our hearts to the Lord and to our brothers and sisters, said Pope Francis, we gain the most precious gift that material things can never give us - it is peace.

Meat: A Threat to Our Planet on BBC Documentary - lucy mangan

Meat: A Threat to Our Planet? (BBC One) pretty early on. You may have felt confident enough to do so after the news that we eat 65bn animals a year, figuring that not much good can come from consumption that vast. Or you may have waited for the scenes in Texas, where beef is considered such a basic commodity that eateries abound that offer free 5lb steaks (just over two kilos) if you can down all of yours in one sitting. Or perhaps your growing feeling of disquiet did not resolve into certainty until you heard a few figures – such as that methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. This means that each one of the 1.5bn cows on Earth heats it as much every year as the CO2 produced by burning 600 litres of petrol.

In pig-rearing regions of North Carolina, lagoonsful of manure – turned aptly pink by the bacteria used to treat the waste – decorate the landscape. But treated or not, when the lagoons overflow the runoff pollutes the entire local water table, causing algal blooms that turn streams into open sewers teeming with E coli and other unhelpful things.

In the Amazon region, cattle-rearing is now the main driver of deforestation (the land, according to the programme,
Monoculture farming is devastating savannah regions, insect populations and – slowly but inexorably – us. Entire species are thought to be going extinct before they’ve even been discovered. What a piece of effing work is man.

We’re raiding the seas now, too, for fish to grind up into meal for the livestock we wish to eat. Along with the turning over of hundreds of thousands of square miles of arable land whose produce would support many humans to crops that fatten animals to feed proportionally fewer of us, it’s such a fantastically inefficient way to run the world you almost find yourself going through the looking glass and wondering whether someone actually planned it.

the presenter of the documentary , wildlife biologist Liz Bonnin, dug ever deeper into the consequences of our carnivorous ways.