In this Sunday’s gospel Jesus tells the Samaritan woman he is the "gift of God” who shows God’s great care for God’s people. In the aftermath of the post-earthquake disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, a number of countries are questioning whether nuclear power is a gift and if human beings are really capable of caring for it.

Several nations have begun to reexamine their nuclear policies, though no consensus exists on how to move forward. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is pushing for the European Union to have common safety standards for nuclear power plants, but ahead of a meeting of European leaders in Brussels Thursday energy ministers could not even agree on how and when to conduct stress tests on European nuclear plants.

For its part Germany plans to abandon nuclear energy for good. The transition was supposed to happen slowly over the next 25 years, but now it is being accelerated in the wake of the Japanese disaster. Germany’s phase-out may provide a road map that countries such as the United States, which uses a similar amount of nuclear power, could follow, but not countries like France, which relies on nuclear energy for more than 70 percent of its power and has no intention of shifting.

In Italy the prospect of losing upcoming local elections has forced the conservative government to slow its push to reintroduce nuclear power. Rome is calling for a one-year moratorium on nuclear power, but antinuclear activists say it's a ploy to buy time. Switzerland said it was halting plans for new reactors, while other countries, including the U.S., announced reviews of plants. Still others, however, said they would forge ahead with nuclear energy plans.

Jesus calls on his followers to “do the will of the one who sent me,” and the ongoing crisis in Japan raises ethical as well as environmental and health issues about energy use and the future of nuclear power, said Catholic ethicists. The accident could be a "huge wake-up call" that would "give impetus to jump starting massive research" in other energy technologies, such as solar and wind power, said William French, director of the Center for Ethics at Loyola University Chicago.

Sources: Articles by Mario Trujillo for PRNewswire-USNewswire, Sylvia Poggioli for National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and Catholic News Service