Manila: Clerics have been told to abandon the use of ivory for devotional objects as officials said these items come at the cost of the loss of lives of wild animals.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), in a statement, said continuous demand for ivory and its products leads to the slaughter of wildlife through poaching which is inconsistent with the Church teachings promoting respect for animals.
“The Church must do its part (on wildlife conservation),” Archbishop Socrates Villegas, president of the CBCP said and vowed to raise awareness about the illegal ivory trade.
Earlier, it had been reported that among the users of ivory are Catholic Churches that use images carved from such material to adorn altars.
Ivory comes from the horn or tusks of animals such as elephants, rhinoceros, deer as well as carapaces or shells of turtles.
In 2013, the government made a landmark gesture of abandoning the use of ivory by destroying five tonnes of elephant tusks seized from wildlife traders.
Elephants are not endemic in the Philippines and most of such prohibited materials seized in the country were smuggled by illegal wildlife products merchants.
“I appeal to my brother bishops of the Philippines to prohibit the clerics from blessing any new statue, image or object of devotion made or crafted from material such as ivory or similar body parts of endangered or protected animals, nor shall such new statues or images be used as objects of veneration in any of our churches,” Villegas said.
“I propose to my brother bishops to enforce the directive that no donation of any new statue or religious object made from ivory or materials extracted, taken or derived from protected and endangered species shall be accepted and blessed,” he said.
Villegas said avoiding the use of ivory will go a long way in stopping the senseless slaughter of wildlife.
He said that Pope Francis, in his recent encyclical on the environment, has warned against “unprecedented destruction of ecosystems” by a world that treats nature as a commodity and exploits it.
He said that in the Philippines alone, endemic species have been hardly provided with the care they need. In the global scale, he adds, the situation was “nothing less than alarming.”
“No matter the beauty of a work of art, it cannot justify the slaughter of wildlife, the use of endangered organic forms and lending a seal of approval to the threat posed to biodiversity by poachers and traffickers,” he added.
“Every instance of beauty is a reflection of the infinite beauty of the Creator. We cannot, without offending the Creator, deface his creation,” Villegas also said.
