Sisters across North America are conducting energy audits of their buildings and renovating them using earth-friendly standards, purchasing recycled paper products and nontoxic cleaning products, chosing hybrid cars for their fleets, sod-busting their land to restore native wetland or prairie, and supporting sustainable agriculture by choosing organic or locally sourced food over standard grocery fare.
“As Al Gore would say, it is a moral issue to reduce our carbon footprint today,” said Sr. Corinne Wright, environmental initatives manager for the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia, whose Aston, PA, complex including a 150-year-old motherhouse and Red Hill Farm, runs on clean energy. “It is a choice that is somewhat more expensive. We are sacrificing in other ways so we make less of a footprint..I guess it boils down to conscious living.”
Pope Benedict XVI’s personal commitment to protecting the environment delights me and gives me hope. I am gratified to see an increasing amount of statements from the Holy See on the environment, particularly on global warming and energy consumption.
Archbishop Celestino Migliore, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, affirmed this commitment during the session ”Addressing Climate Change: The United Nations and the World at Work.”
In his February 13th address, Archbishop Migliore noted some of the steps the Vatican is taking to offset their carbon footprints. Solar panels are scheduled to be installed in the Vatican. The Holy See is also participating in a tree planting project in Hungary, which will “provide environmental benefits to the host country, assist in the recovery of an environmentally degraded tract of land, and provide local jobs.”
He highlighted the shared responsibility of individuals and nations in protecting the planet.
“It is incumbent upon every individual and nation to seriously assume one’s share of the responsibility to find and implement the most balanced approach possible to this challenge,” he said. “Sustainable development provides the key to a strategy that harmoniously takes into account the demands of environmental preservation, climate change, economic development and basic human needs.”
All Souls Interfaith Gathering, founded in 1999, prides itself on being one of the greenest churches in the Green State. Their new sanctuary is a model of ecological correctness: locally harvested wood, bamboo flooring, compact fluorescent lights and a furnace that will heat using grass, corn and wood pellets.
I’d like to think we’re cutting edge, said the Rev. Mary Abele. She heads a congregation of 70 that is growing every week. “I suspect some come now because of our environmental practices.”
The new sanctuary’s west-facing windows capture one of the most stunning views you’ll ever see–rolling farm land, Lake Champlain and the snow-capped Adirondack Mountains beyond.
When the building opened, Abele told the Burlington Free Press that the views are “inspiration to help us understand who we are in connection to the environment and the divine.” It’s a theme that runs through everything ASIG does.
“The building needed to blend with the surrounding site rather than stand out. (We needed to) play the building down, make it inviting, make it calm, play on the beauty of the site and surroundings, let the building be the shelter from which one can appreciate the whole,” said Marty Sienkiewycz of SAS Architects in Burlington, VT., who designed the project with congregation members.
At ASIG, the earth is woven into every service. “There’s a connection between the environmental and the spiritual,” said Laurie Caswell Burke, ASIG’s environmental coordinator.
Using an image from St. Gregory of Nyssa, Benedict XVI said the stable in Bethlehem represents our “ill-treated world,” polluted especially by the abuse of energy and its exploitation.
During his homily at Christmas Midnight Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Pope spoke of St. Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of the stable into which Christ was born. “What would he say if he could see the state of the world today, through the abuse of energy and its selfish and reckless exploitation?”
“Thus, according to Gregory’s vision, the stable in the Christmas message represents the ill-treated world. What Christ rebuilds is no ordinary place. He came to restore beauty and dignity to creation, to the universe…Christmas is the feast of restored creation.”
