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The Catholic Church in the U.S. is failing in its capacity to respond to climate change and to live up to its mission to safeguard God's creation, a theologian said this week during a lecture that spawned an act of contrition from the archbishop in attendance.
Daniel DiLeo, an assistant theology professor at Creighton University and director of its justice and peace studies program, made the comments March 22 during the annual Schemmel theology lecture at Clarke University, in Dubuque, Iowa. The online talk provided an overview of Catholic teaching on the environment, climate science and how the two intertwine.
Toward the end of his presentation, DiLeo, who is also a consultant for Catholic Climate Covenant, said the U.S. church is in an "almost ideal" position to respond to climate change. "We've got the mission, we've got the ethics" and the call to evangelization, he said, but moreover, it has the logistics to make a serious difference — in terms of people (about 70 million Catholics in the U.S., or 20% of the population), institutions (176 dioceses, nearly 17,000 parishes and thousands of schools, hospitals and advocacy networks), infrastructure (more than 100,000 buildings and millions of acres of land) and money.
The Catholic Climate Covenant launched a new initiative this week that looks to mobilize young Catholics to spur greater action on climate change in the church and around the country.
More than 70 people, predominantly young adults, joined an online event Feb. 23 to learn more about the youth-oriented program.
Anna Robertson, the group's new director of youth and young adult mobilization, said its goal is "to inspire and empower meaningful action" among young people in the church, within their parishes and dioceses, as well as in the wider national public square.
Feb 09, 2021
Laudato Si' Platform rollout, diocesan farm for poor highlighted at social justice conference
An Illinois diocesan farm that grows food for the poor and the latest on the Vatican's plans to implement Pope Francis' encyclical were among the environmental updates that participants heard this weekend at the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering.
The conference, held Feb. 6-9 and organized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, is virtual this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. The nearly three dozen sessions included two workshops on Feb. 7, along with two prerecorded videos, on ways Catholics and other faith communities are addressing issues related to climate change and environmental justice.
At a panel focusing on efforts across the country to advance the pope's 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home," Jose Aguto, associate director of Catholic Climate Covenant, described the Vatican's Laudato Si' Action Platform, which will officially launch in May.
The platform charts a path for seven levels of the church — families, parishes, dioceses, schools, colleges and universities, religious orders, and healthcare institutions — to become fully sustainable in the spirit of the encyclical within seven years. Aguto said it will set goals and metrics in four areas: spirituality, social action, advocacy and sustainability.
"The Vatican is seeking to lift up care for creation across every single Catholic institution," he said.
CLEVELAND (CNS) — With a parcel of unused land, a small-town Illinois parish has started a community garden to feed the hungry and follow the call to care for the earth in response to one of Pope Francis’ encyclicals.
Known as Jordan River Farm, the project at Sacred Heart Mission in rural Kankakee County is part of the Diocese of Joliet’s Laudato Si’ Ministries program, Kayla Jacobs, ministry director, explained during a prerecorded Catholic Social Ministries Gathering workshop.
The small farm, run by volunteers is helping feed residents of nearby Hopkins Park, population 600, about 75 miles south of Chicago. Jacobs said the project is an example of how local parishes can help implement the pope’s ideas found in “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home.”
WASHINGTON (CNS) -- On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed 17 executive orders and proclamations aimed at undoing policies set in place by his predecessor, Donald Trump.
Some of Trump's executive orders undone by Biden's actions Jan. 20 were themselves reversals of policies by other past presidents.
Biden boosted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program put in place by Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, and which Trump sought unsuccessfully to end. Also, the 46th president revoked the Trump administration's bid to exclude noncitizens from the decennial U.S. census count.
In one of his first acts in office, President Joe Biden began the process for the U.S. to rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change and to reestablish the scores of environmental regulations undone by his predecessor in the Oval Office.
Biden, seated at the Resolute Desk in the West Wing of the White House, signed the notice to re-enter the Paris accord Jan. 20 just hours after taking the oath of office. It was later deposited with the United Nations, and under the agreement, will take effect in 30 days, or Feb. 19. The U.S. will also have to submit a new greenhouse gas emissions-reduction plan.
"We're going to combat climate change in a way that we haven't done so far," Biden said.
The U.S. return to the Paris Agreement "recasts our global solidarity to act with all other nations to address the human-made climate emergency," Mercy Sr. Áine O'Connor, a member of the Mercy Sisters' leadership team, told EarthBeat in an email.
In a major effort, the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, introduced a solar power program in collaboration with Catholic Energies, a program of the Catholic Climate Covenant.
The covenant also introduced the Catholic Climate Project, an intergenerational movement to respond through action and prayer to the challenges posed by climate change. The effort is set to build on what parishioners and organizations already are doing while inviting more people to deepen the Catholic commitment to protect creation.
2020 also marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day April 22. In a statement on its website about the day, the California Catholic Conference noted that Earth Day awareness and activism have led to the Clean Air, Clear Water and Endangered Species acts.
Commitments made by countries at a virtual climate summit on Dec. 12 are a step forward, but still not enough to slow global warming sufficiently, leaders of Catholic and other faith-based climate groups say.
"It's important to keep some momentum going, " said Daniel Misleh, founding executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant. "But clearly there need to be many more robust commitments to keep us to a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature."
And while countries announced targets, the means of achieving them aren't clear, said Chiara Martinelli, senior adviser at CIDSE, an international coalition of Catholic social justice organizations.
This Advent, the waiting is all-consuming. We are waiting to see how our makeshift Christmas plans will turn out. We are waiting for the end of the pandemic. We await a government transition. Now seems like a great time for Christ to renew the face of the Earth.
For those of us who have watched closely as wildfires and hurricanes devastated our country in 2020, we are also waiting for the world to get serious about action on climate change.
Five years ago, on Dec. 12, the nations of the world finally decided together to stave off the worst of the climate disruption that has threatened lives and livelihoods around the world. Earlier in that year of 2015, Pope Francis created a media storm with his encyclical "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home," followed by his visit to the United States.
When Father John Grace, pastor of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Hampton, talks about the hundreds of solar panels that now cover the roof of the church sanctuary, he talks not just about saving money on electricity, but protecting God’s creation.
“That is adding something to the quality of life for the future,” Grace said of the solar panel array that was installed in July 2019.
Grace said it was a project his parishioners embraced and now look at with pride.
“I have got a lot of retirees,” in the parish, he said. When the idea of installing solar panels was first proposed, “they said, ‘Let’s go for it,’ which you might not expect from an older parish, but they did.”
“We are saving about 10% or 11%” on energy costs, Grace said. “We have also avoided [producing] about 175 tons of greenhouse gases.”
Wilton Gregory, soon to be the first African American Catholic cardinal, has distinguished himself among archbishops with his embrace of Pope Francis's landmark encyclical on the environment and climate change.
Gregory, 72, the archbishop of Washington, has, during his long career in the church, spoken out for racial justice, welcomed LGBTQ Catholics and led the church's "zero-tolerance" response to sex abuse in the United States after the crisis with priests that emerged in the 1990s.
But it was in 2015, with the issuance of the Pope's "Laudato Si': On Care for our Common Home," that Gregory, at the time the Archbishop of Atlanta, asked for an action plan to implement Francis's seminal embrace of climate science. That action plan has been used as inspiration for other faith guides in Boston, Columbus, Minneapolis, San Diego and beyond.
When President Donald Trump announced in 2017 his intention to make the United States the first and lone nation in the world to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change, he justified the move by saying he was "elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris."
But three years later, it was voters in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and across Pennsylvania that delivered the presidency to his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, who has vowed to immediately re-enter the global climate accord as the first step in enacting his ambitious environmental platform built on the prospect of jobs and justice.
Early reaction from Catholic and environmental activists expressed a guarded optimism that a Biden administration will reorient the country on climate after four years of inaction, but they were well aware of the hurdles he faces — none larger than the potential legislative impasse should Republicans retain control of the U.S. Senate.
"As people of faith, we are grateful that President-elect Biden has a plan to address the climate crisis," said Chloe Noel, project coordinator on faith, economy and ecology for the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns.
CLEVELAND — A large majority of Catholic voters believe climate change is a serious or somewhat serious concern and that governments at all levels as well as corporations and individuals must take stronger action to address it, according to results of a new poll released Oct. 22.
Conducted Oct. 13 by Climate Nexus, Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, the online poll showed that 78 percent of nonwhite Catholics and 74 percent of white Catholics who participated consider climate change a serious or somewhat serious problem.
At the same time, 82 percent of nonwhite Catholics and 77 percent of white Catholics said they are very worried or somewhat worried about climate change.
For months now, Neddy Astudillo, a Presbyterian pastor, has doggedly worked the phones and webinars from her Tampa home, reaching out to religious congregations across Florida in an effort to get out the vote — particularly a vote that considers climate change.
"We've come to a point in our human history that our vote and our say and our policies [in the United States] have an impact, and will have an impact, on millions of people around the world, and have and will have on future generations," especially related to climate change, she said.
It's a message Astudillo has repeated in conversations about the importance of the presidential election as part of the Compassionate Voter Campaign, an election season undertaking by the interreligious group GreenFaith — one of numerous efforts by climate-focused faith groups to mobilize religious voters to take environmental concerns with them to the ballot box.
Addressing climate change is a faith-based obligation to “protect God’s creation,” say 81 percent of American religious voters surveyed in a poll released this morning from Climate Nexus and Yale and George Mason’s respective programs on climate change communications.
According to the poll, which surveyed voters who identified as evangelical and mainline Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and religiously unaffiliated, voters of faith largely believe in climate change, are worried about it, and support providing federal funding to communities vulnerable to extreme weather in potential COVID-19 recovery funding.
“People are dying today from the impact of our neglect of God's creation,” said Dan Misleh, founding executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant.
While many Catholics in the United States today are debating Pope Francis’ reported nod to homosexual civil unions, there appears to be growing agreement within the US church both in the reality of climate change and that the issue must be addressed.
According to polling released this morning by Climate Nexus, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 80% of white Catholic voters and 77% of nonwhite Catholic voters agree that climate change is happening.
A majority of US Catholic voters would also support policies that address climate change, such as clean energy infrastructure. 76% of nonwhite Catholic voters expressed such support as did 68% of white Catholic voters.
Dan Misleh, executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, does not believe in climate change. “I believe in God, something that I have not seen or directly witnessed—that’s a belief,” Mr. Misleh told Sebastian Gomes, host of the Voting Catholic podcast. “But climate change is scientific fact. I don’t ‘believe’ in it. I know it. It’s a fact.”
Mr. Misleh spoke on these facts, celebrated Pope Francis’ encyclical “Laudato Si’” and encouraged Catholics to take responsibility for the planet and mitigating climate change. The pope’s “message is that there are three relationships that are out of kilter,” Mr. Misleh said. “Our relationship with God, our relationship with one another and our relationship with nature.”
Climate change made a surprise appearance at the presidential debate on Tuesday night — for the first time since 2008 — even though it was not on the list of questions initially planned by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News.
A poll by partners in the Covering Climate Now media consortium found that 72% of respondents wanted a climate question included in the presidential debates. And even before the debate, Joseph Winters at Grist argued that the other questions — including those related to the Supreme Court, the coronavirus pandemic and the economy — were also about climate.
“My goal is for the Diocese of Richmond to be the greenest in the country,” Charles Mikell, the diocese’s director of real estate, told America. That dream means converting or connecting 146 parishes, 23 schools, eight nursing homes and eight cemeteries to solar energy. For a diocese that covers 33,000 square miles, about four-fifths of Virginia, the metric tons of greenhouse gas reductions could quickly add up.
Pushing back against single-issue voting, the bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, said Catholics should consider concerns beyond abortion, such as the environment, when evaluating candidates for political office.
The comments from Bishop John Stowe came during a webinar Sept. 10 on Catholic social teaching and political participation hosted by the Catholic Climate Covenant. The event was the first of a five-part series for the Season of Creation (Sept. 1-Oct. 4) that seeks to equip Catholics with a basis of Catholic social teaching, including care for creation, to use in marking their ballot in the November elections.
Solar Builder readers submitted their coolest, most innovative and noteworthy solar projects of the last 12 months, and after combing through another record amount of submissions, we’ve narrowed the field to these 2020 Project of the Year nominees!
Sep 11, 2020
Podcasts from the Future: Dan Misleh
Reflections and results of the research and studies are collected in podcasts that the Vatican COVID-19 Commission makes available to anyone who wants to stay informed about the progress of the work it is carrying out.
We share some of the best podcasts produced during the work of the taskforces, on the topics of ecology, security, economy and health.
Enjoy listening and learning!
This week on Just Love, Monsignor Kevin Sullivan talks about Hurricane Laura and the effects of climate change on the poor.
Ben Broussard is the Chief Communications Officer of Catholic Charities of Acadiana located in the Diocese of Lafayette in Southern Louisiana Cajun Country. Ben talks about the impact that Hurricane Laura has had on his community and surrounding communities in southern Louisiana, and how Catholic Charities of Acadiana is partnering with other Catholic Charities agencies across the state to assist those who have been impacted by the storm in communities that were already dealing with the onslaught of the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Dan Misleh got the idea for Catholic Energies after Pope Francis called on Catholics to take up a “commitment to the environment” in his 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si.
Misleh had been speaking to Catholic groups on climate, as executive director of Catholic Climate Covenant, and people would often tell him they couldn’t persuade their pastor, or their Catholic school principal, to talk about climate issues.
RICHMOND, Virginia — Seven Catholic entities in the Diocese of Richmond are going solar.
Inspired by Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home, parishes and schools have partnered with Catholic Energies, a program of the Washington-based Catholic Climate Covenant, to integrate solar energy and other energy-saving tools into daily operations.
Catholic Energies projects the efforts will offset more than 45,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases — about that of an average passenger car driven 100 million miles — over the next 25 years.
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