Hope this finds you well. I am sure Thanksgiving will take on a special meaning for you this year. You may enjoy this article....Sr. Pat Daly from NJ is a friend of mine....she goes toe-to-toe with the CEO's regularly at shareholder meetings. Jack Welch of GE said of her, "she not a nun, she's a nudge"! Keep on nudging too!!
PS: Did you catch the story on ABC news last evening about the campaign "what would Jesus drive?".......you were ahead of your time!! --Maurice
Can Catholics Save The World?
By Joan Lowy
Ecology, the pope says, is a moral matter. Now Christians have begun asking: “What Would Jesus Drive?”
Even Biblical plagues and floods might have trouble rivaling the calamitous warnings of many of the world’s leading scientists:
• Melting polar icecaps will raise sea levels, submerging island nations and flooding coasts;
• Tropical diseases and pests are spreading to temperate regions as the Earth warms;
• Half the planet’s animal species will be extinct by the end of this century;
• Scarcity of fresh water in some volatile regions of the world could provoke mass migrations and war.
It is understandable then that nearly all the nation’s major churches and denominations have begun to embrace environmentalism with a degree of fervor reminiscent of the newly evangelized:
• Redwood rabbis are working to preserve forests;
• Episcopalians are electrifying churches with renewable energy;
• Conservative evangelical Noah congregations are trying to save endangered species;
• In Des Moines, Iowa, environmental specialists with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference are preaching about the perils of pollution and social injustices caused by large-scale factory farms;
• In Wyandotte, Michigan, St. Elizabeth Catholic Church erected solar panels and a small windmill on the rectory roof;
• In Lynn, Massachusetts, 100 ministers, priests, rabbis, and their supporters demonstrated against gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles on a roadway outside a strip of car dealerships last year. One United Church of Christ minister held up a placard asking motorists the provocative question: “What Would Jesus Drive?”
Sometimes called creation care, earth stewardship or green spirituality, the new religious environmentalism is based on the theological view that God expects humankind to care for the world, not abuse it.
“A large motivation for this movement is an increasing understanding that creation is imperiled,” says the Rev. Fred Small, a Unitarian minister and co-chairman of the interfaith Religious Witness for the Earth, which organized the SUV protest. “When one has that epiphany, one must look at the environment not as a luxury, but rather as a central moral issue.”
The movement began informally in the early 1990s after a group of leading scientists publicly called for religious leaders to involve themselves in protecting the environment, saying that without moral leadership the degradation of the planet could not be reversed.
As the movement gained converts, it also began to rack up political victories. In 1995, evangelical Christian activists helped persuade House Republican leaders to drop their effort to gut the Endangered Species Act. In the late 1990s, a campaign by religious leaders culminated in a new federal policy barring road-building for logging in pristine forests.
Lobbying by a broad coalition of religious leaders also played an important role in the Senate defeat earlier this year of President George Bush’s proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling, according to members of Congress and environmentalists.
“I think they made a huge difference to the Arctic refuge vote,” says Melanie Griffin of the Sierra Club. “They brought a long-term perspective and a moral authority to the argument.”
While the movement’s energy is most evident at the grassroots, top religious leaders around the world have endorsed the cause. In June, Pope John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians, signed a joint declaration in Venice, Italy, stating that protecting the environment is a “moral and spiritual” duty.
Russell Testa, director of the Franciscan Holy Name Province Office for Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation, sees “a growing awareness of the theological underpinnings” of creation care.
Of late, the issue of climate change induced by the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels has superceded other issues, becoming the chief focus of religious environmentalism.
“It seems to me that it’s the most dramatic and most challenging of all the environmental issues we face,” says the Rev. Margaret Bullitt-Jonas, associate rector of the All Saints Episcopal Church in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Bullitt-Jonas was one of 22 Religious and lay people from a variety of faiths arrested a year ago while protesting Bush administration policies that favor the use of fossil fuels. Protesters knelt in prayer outside the Department of Energy in Washington and sang Amazing Grace as they were handcuffed and taken to jail.
We have to be like Noah,” says Small, who was also arrested. “Noah built an ark because God warned of the coming storm, but Noah built the ark before the storm came. We have waited too long already.”
That message is being echoed not only in the streets by religious protesters, but in the annual stockholder meetings of some of the world’s largest energy corporations. The Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility — made up of 275 Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic institutional investors controlling approximately $110 billion in assets — has joined with secular environmentalists in a campaign to pressure ExxonMobil to reverse its stance on climate change.
In May, a resolution urging ExxonMobil to adopt a plan for investment in renewable energy resources garnered the support of 20.3% of the shareholder vote at the company’s annual meeting in Dallas — more than double the 8.9% the same resolution achieved the previous year.
“This is the year that the campaign against ExxonMobil on global warming truly achieved critical mass,” says Sister Patricia Daly, executive director of the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, whose members are Catholic dioceses and Religious in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. “We are now positioned as never before to bring pressure on ExxonMobil to face the facts about climate change.”
Environmentalism is as much about the Catholic duty to help the poor as it is about protecting the planet, says Daly, a Dominican in Caldwell, N.J., and a key leader in the religious investors’ campaign against Exxon-Mobil. “Global warming,” Daly says, “represents a grave injustice in that poor people around the planet will suffer the greatest.”
But not everyone believes the creation care movement is made in heaven. Some critics see it as a threat to free-market economics and technological progress, while others suspect it’s a cover for pagan Earth worship. One vocal critic has been the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a pro-business think tank in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“The danger of the partnership between Christian churches and the radical environmental lobby is that the opinions of environmental groups tend to become invested with the teaching and moral authority afforded to the churches,” Acton staffers Phillip DeVous and Andrew Brand argue in a commentary posted on the institute’s Web site.
Indeed, the alliance between secular environmentalists and religious activists is not always an easy one. Mainstream environmentalists are often more comfortable with scientific and economic arguments than with spiritual ones. And some religious activists question whether environmentalists sometimes lose sight of the economic realities that many people face. Nevertheless, the environmental and creation care movements are unlikely to unravel.
“After almost 35 years,” says Tom English, vice-moderator of Presbyterians for Restoring Creation, “I think there is a lesson here that neither scientific nor economic nor technological arguments by themselves are enough.”
“I think people are looking at (religious involvement) as a great hope.” CD