Parish ministries live out call of Laudato Si’

Pope Francis’ encyclical inspires East Tennessee Catholics ‘to achieve climate and ecological justice’

Care for our common home.”

This phrase was made popular by Pope Francis in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, in which the pope both encourages the faithful to practice good stewardship toward the earth that God has given and criticizes the abuse of natural resources and the poor.

Pope Francis writes: “The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change. The Creator does not abandon us; He never forsakes His loving plan or repents of having created us. Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home” (Laudato Si’, paragraph 13).

Laudato Si’ Week is celebrated May 21-28 this year, and parishes in the diocese are embracing the call to care for the environment.

All Saints Parish, Knoxville

The Creation Care Team meets at All Saints Church at 1 p.m. on the second Wednesday of the month.

“Our team started about two years ago,” said Connie Brace. “We grew out of a person by the name of Beth Hunley here in town who was interested in climate issues…. Beth has a group that is called Catholic Response to Climate Change, and it’s been meeting on Zoom.”

As people gathered for the monthly Zoom calls, it became evident that several of the individuals were from All Saints Parish.

“We decided to go ahead and form a parish group that was willing by then to meet in person and start trying to develop activities at the parish level,” Mrs. Brace said.

The main theme of the group became promoting Laudato Si’ and “the whole idea that concern about the climate and the earth is a Catholic social-justice issue,” Mrs. Brace said, noting that they were influenced by the organizations Laudato Si’ Movement and Catholic Climate Covenant.

Laudato Si’ Movement’s mission is “to inspire and mobilize the Catholic community to care for our common home and achieve climate and ecological justice, in collaboration with all people of good will,” according to its website.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops helped to form Catholic Climate Covenant in 2006 and “helps U.S. Catholics respond to the Church’s call to care for creation and care for the poor,” its website states.

Mrs. Brace said that their group has “gone a lot of different directions” in the last two years.

“We started out just doing bulletin inserts, quoting from Laudato Si’ and trying to encourage people to think about what is in this encyclical,” she said.

The group has done several activities to support its mission: praying the rosary with the theme of climate care; praying the Ecological Stations of the Cross; Earth Day activities, such as distributing seeds; volunteering on river or street trash cleanups; presentations on recycling and composting; and celebrating the ecumenical Season of Creation with displays in the parish narthex.

“We’ve involved the Girl Scouts, we do the blessing of the animals— just every place that we could make a fingerprint, we have tried,” said team member Denise Clark.

The group also showed a viewing of “The Letter,” a film that “tells the story of a journey to Rome of frontline leaders to discuss the encyclical letter Laudato Si’ with Pope Francis,” according to its website. “The Letter” can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Another action item that the ministry has undertaken is an energy audit for both the parish and Knoxville Catholic High School, which shares a campus with the church.

“We understood that having an energy audit would be one of the steps that our Creation Care Team would want to take in our general plan, which we’re just formulating at this point,” Ms. Clark said. “The energy audit, I was aware, was available through the TVA engineer as long as we could obtain funding from the utility agency.”

“At the same time I asked for the high school, because we want to get youth involved in the climate-care movement and because we figured the high school has rather great energy needs, given all the different activities that they have at all different hours, weekends, etc.,” she con-

By Gabrielle Nolan

tinued. “So we obviously wanted to save energy where possible.”

The TVA engineer did a tour of both facilities and is currently preparing a report “to make suggestions as to energy savings, equipment that needs to be replaced, which perhaps could become EnergyStar equipment, and any other measures that might be taken,” Ms. Clark noted.

Mrs. Brace shared that while climate-change issues may be very popular in the newspaper, most people do not connect it to their faith.

“People’s awareness may be real high, but I think maybe linking that