ATC 5 Caring for Creation

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Welcome to another edition of All Things Catholic. I’m your host, Deacon Rudy Villarreal and I’m so glad you’re here! Together we are going to explore what it means to be Catholic. Today as we prepare to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the 5th anniversary of Laudato Si’, we’re going to begin a discussion about what it means to be a Christian living in right relation with God and his creation. By the way, if there’s a topic you’re interested in learning more about, please let me know. Send me an email to rudy@deaconrudysnotes.org or by using the comment form on the website www.deaconrudysnotes.org.

I’ve got to tell you, I’m still glowing from a pilgrimage to Lourdes and a most excellent birthday weekend in London. We all need downtime. The Gospels give us many examples of Jesus going away from the crowds that followed him, often with a small group of his closest disciples, to get away for prayer and rest. If you haven’t been on a spiritual retreat or pilgrimage, I highly encourage you to consider it. There are many reputable retreat and pilgrimage opportunities out there that range from highly visible faith leaders on the world stage who draw from large, national audience, to locally organized events. Check with your parish office to learn how you can find out more about retreats in your area and pilgrimages being organized from your area.

So, why this topic? Well, a few months ago, I really stepped into it on Twitter @deaconrudy. A priest had made comment that his diocese was really pushing all parish religious education classes to study Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, but to his disappointment many of the students didn’t know the most basic prayers of our faith tradition. He suggested that we should be spending more time with learning our prayers.

My reply was that while that it is a tragedy that so many children are not being taught their prayers at home, for the Catholic it’s not either or – it’s not either prayers or creation, it’s both/and. In other words, living out our faith is the real testimony of our academic knowledge.

Well, one of his other followers did not agree with me. She replied that global warming, the global environmental crisis is simply not true. I don’t want to misstate what she said, but the gist was something along the lines that it is wrong for the Church to get politically involved especially in such a fiction.

My reply back to her was that for the believer, it’s not really about global warming. It’s about living out our faith every hour, every minute every second of the day in a way that is consistent with what we say we believe.

And this went on for a little bit – some back-and-forth comments and comments of support that I received from others in the Twitterverse. But that really started me thinking that I personally need to do more with trying to help bridge this gap. The Church isn’t about one perspective or another, and it’s not about saying I like pious types of activities so I’m going to do that or I like social justice so I’m going to do that. It’s all of that together. It’s about experiencing the Catholic faith intellectually, spiritually and practically. So I need to do more about connecting those dots and that’s where this idea for this particular episode came from and I suspect that we’ll do several more over the course of this next year as we mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the 5th anniversary of Laudato Si’.

Before we jump into theological waters, it’s important to not allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject. It’s like trying to think about the national debt where you live. It’s really easy to be overwhelmed by the problem and convince yourself there’s nothing you can do about it, and so you do nothing. Pope Francis warns us that merely focusing on the accumulation of data can lead to overload and confusion and that can lead to inaction, (LS, 47). There’s nothing I can do on my own about it, right? Ok, hold on to this idea for just a second.

Next, I want you to think your relationship with the people around you – your spouse, if you’re married, your children, your roommates, your coworkers, people who share your commute. Don’t we expect to be treated with respect and for those around us to share with us whether it’s a spot on the train or space on the highway, or in our personal relationships, don’t we expect some level of sharing? In the spousal relationship, for example, therapist will tell us its unhealthy to place conditions on the relationship or extort our partner in some way. We expect our children to share with their siblings and with other children on the playground or in the classroom. You get the idea, right?

So, how do we get from the idea of sharing to the idea that it’s ok to litter or after we change the oil in our cars, that we can dump the old oil in the stream behind our house? Exploiting nature isn’t really consistent with the way we try to live and the way we try to raise our children – setting aside products we use or the energy or water we consume. So, if we expect more from our spouses and children, and neighbors, and friends and coworkers and even complete strangers, then we can expect more of how the way we live impacts the environment.

Here’s an example from my home in Texas. Single use plastic grocery store bags were causing problems for ranchers in West Texas and fishery operators on the coast. Now the problem wasn’t about global warming and it wasn’t about petroleum and it wasn’t about landfills. The problem was that these bags were ending up in and around livestock – in feeders, clogging up machinery, etc. Worse, some of the livestock would eat the bags which could harm them. These communities began to ban single use plastic bags. It was a simple solution to a real problem that within the realm of what these communities could do.

Unfortunately, the State of Texas has made it illegal for local communities to initiate such ordinances in its current un-Christian and un-Catholic war against local governance. That’s a-whole-nother story that we will revisit in a future episode, but here’s my point. It doesn’t take some global calamity for us to recognize an injustice, like harming livestock, considering viable solutions for that specific problem and implementing solutions and of course evaluating the solution and mitigating against unintended consequences. That’s normal problem solving at the community level.

But there’s a catch. It requires action on our part. Pope Francis points out that the way self-destructive vices work in our lives is that we tend to try to not see them. Maybe we pretend these vices aren’t happening or we pretend these vices are not so bad and that nothing will happen because of this vice, (LS, 59). But vices do have an effect on us, right? The righteous pursuit of justice is a process of conversion.

As we prepare to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and the 5th anniversary of Laudato Si’, we need to remember that justice takes some time and some commitment. That’s part of what it means to live in right relation with God and his creation.

What do you think? Post a comment on the website, www.deaconrudysnotes.org.

For those of you who’ve been listening to the weekend edition of deacon rudy’s notes, you know I’m a huge fan of homework. So, I’d like to begin adding some homework to All Things Catholic. Your homework is to read this weekend’s readings before you get to mass. It’s helpful to read them through at least once. That not only helps us pay better attention to the readings as they are proclaimed, but it also prepares us to listen to the homily.

There are many free resources out there that organize the readings for you, but if you’re not sure where to go, you can check out the free resource offered by the US Catholic bishops. If you enter “USCCB readings” into your favorite browser, you find a link to their webpage that includes a calendar. You can pick the day and then see the readings for that mass. I’ll include a link in the podcast notes. So now you have no excuse – your homework is to go check out the readings for the 7th Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Do you got it? Do you get it? Good! Now go make disciples! May Almighty God bless you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit! +Amen!

I’m Deacon Rudy Villarreal and next time on All Things Catholic, at the request of one of our faithful listeners in Switzerland and in the light of the Pope’s post-synodal exhortation on the Amazon, “Querida Amazonia”, we’re going to talk about change. The Second Vatican Council’s document, Gaudium et spes, calls on the laity and the Church to “recognize the signs of the time,” (4). What does that mean and how exactly does that work?

You’re listening to All Things Catholic.

This episode was produced by deacon rudy’s notes. Our theme music was composed by Silent Partner. You can find all sorts of helpful information on the website at www.deaconrudysnotes.org. I’m your host, Deacon Rudy Villarreal. Join us again next time and don’t forget to watch for the weekend edition where we break open the Word. Peace!

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