Four and a half years after the publication of Laudato Si’, Catholic enthusiasm for the environment is still going strong.
At the global level, for example, there is the Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM), an umbrella organization representing over 650 Catholic groups and tens of thousands of individuals from all over the planet. To date, members have hosted hundreds of prayer services; marched by the tens of thousands in mass climate demonstrations; divested millions of dollars from fossil fuel investments (including by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines and Caritas agencies in Italy, Singapore, Australia, and Norway); and collected nearly one million signatures on a climate petition that was endorsed by Pope Francis and submitted to GOP leaders at the Paris climate talks.
The GCCM’s Live Laudato Si’ pledge, which commits signatories to prayer, advocacy, and simple living, has been endorsed by several of today’s most influential Church leaders, including Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle of Manila, Maria Voce (Focolare Movement), Father Richard Rohr, and many others.
At the local level, parishes are slowly beginning to implement Laudato Si’ teachings into their own communities. At Our Lady of Fatima parish in Coquitlam, the EcoFatima group has implemented an impressive number of initiatives, including: bringing recycling and compost services to the parish hall; introducing a “no-bottled-water” policy and stocking the hall with additional drinking glasses and water pitchers; celebrating the annual Rogation Day blessing of seeds; and promoting sustainable eating through a local Christian CSA program run by A Rocha Canada.
As usual, young people are often the ones leading the way. For three years, under the leadership of long-time staff member Ginette Ziemnicki, the OLF School EcoKids club ran the Meat-Free Friday program, where Grades 4 to 7 students cooked and sold vegetable-based meals to promote sustainable food practices and raise funds for other green school initiatives.
This year’s club has over 30 students, and it is both inspiring and humbling to see how passionately these young students want to live out their faith through care for creation.
At our start-of-year planning meeting, some of the students’ most popular ideas were to plant an organic flower garden for Mary, craft non-plastic rosaries, protect ocean animals, and continue the Meat-Free Friday program.
Despite the tremendous support EcoFatima and the EcoKids have received, there are also many challenges. For instance, not all parish groups participate equally in the recycling/compost and no-bottled-water programs because it is inconvenient to sort through waste and wash dishes. As in all parishes, there are always difficulties in retaining enough volunteers to perform these tasks. And, of course, the sheer magnitude of the environmental crisis is quite beyond the capacity of a tiny parish group to adequately address, despite our sincere efforts.
Beyond considerations of scope and logistics, the biggest environmental challenge Catholics face is a spiritual one. Only a few weeks ago The B.C. Catholic published back-to-back articles about the environment. Editor Paul Schratz questioned Catholics’ dedication to environmental issues, while suggesting that the science of climate change is up for debate; contributor Colleen Roy insisted on her love for God’s creation, but doesn’t want to hear about it in a sermon.
Both of these cases fail to regard creation as a central feature of our Catholic faith; at best, environmental concern is a “nice” thing to do for God, an extra; at worst, it is a trendy distraction from the real “meat and potatoes” of our faith, things like prayer, sacraments, and pro-life activism.
But if we want to take seriously the central mystery of our faith, that Jesus Christ was incarnated and made fully human (i.e., fully creation) for our salvation, we must also believe that this physical, material, creaturely stuff from which the universe is made is not just a nice “extra” that God bestows upon us.
Physical creation must also be both sanctifying and sacramental: it is the very means through which God reveals God’s self to us, through which we encounter Christ in the sacraments, and through which we build up the Church in the Holy Spirit.
Every Eucharist testifies to this basic fact: bread and wine, actual physical food that we consume with our bodies, leading to the most intimate of encounters with Jesus and eternal life in the (bodily) resurrection.
Creation care cannot be an afterthought of our moral and spiritual life, because creation itself is not an afterthought. How will we celebrate the Eucharist if the bread that is meant to nourish is laced with toxic pesticides? Baptism, when our last sources of freshwater have been polluted or dried up? How do we suppose to protect unborn children if their mothers are without nutritious food, clean water, and fresh air?
It is this kind of ecological conversion to which Laudato Si’ calls us, and which the members of the Synod for the Amazon are crying out for. Four years later, we have reason to hope, but there is still much work to be done.
Christine Legal is a parishioner at Our Lady of Fatima, Coquitlam, and head of the parish’s EcoFatima ministry.