A group of Catholic sisters at the Green Mountain Monastery in Vermont have prioritized care for the planet as the most important “pro-life issue” facing the Church and society.
Highlighted this week by the progressive National Catholic Reporter, the Sisters of the Earth Community says its mission is to go into the future “with the natural world as a single sacred community.”
“We were welcomed into the Diocese of Vermont by Bishop Kenneth Angel and on June 1,1999, arrived in Vermont,” the group states on its website.
The community recognizes as its “mentor, teacher and co-founder,” Father Thomas Berry (1914-2009), a self-described “geologian,” called by Newsweek magazine “the most provocative figure among the new breed of eco-theologians.”
“If a women’s religious congregation committed to the protection of the natural world was unthinkable in former centuries, it is now unthinkable that any such congregation should not be committed to this task,” Berry maintained.
Berry adopted his own version of ecospirituality, envisioning a new era in which humans would “halt the destruction of species caused by the impact of extractive industries, pollution and abuse of the earth, and develop a closer relationship with the earth and nature.”
The transplanted Catholic nuns and laywomen include co-founder Sister Gail Worcelo, a former Passionist nun from St. Gabriel’s Monastery in Pennsylvania.
The Sisters of the Earth Community, “is the first community of Catholic sisters founded specifically for Earth healing and protection within the ecozoic era,” Sister Worcelo asserts.
“This mission should be upheld and promoted and shared and invited in the church,” Worcelo contends. “It’s what’s on the leading edge of Christian responsibility, the planet — it is the largest pro-life issue.”
“Think of Earth as a lifeboat — if the Earth goes down, all our ministries, all our good works, all our contributions are going to go down with it,” she adds.
The Sisters of the Earth Community has yet to attain the status of a public association in the Church, the next canonical step before becoming a religious congregation.
The mixing of environmentalism and Christian spirituality has received a big boost from Pope Francis, who in 2015 became the first pope in history to devote an entire encyclical letter to the topic of care for the environment with the publication of Laudato Si (“Praised Be”).
In that text, the pontiff said that the earth “is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” as “once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish.”
He also denounced a failure to recycle paper and other resources, while calling climate change “a global problem with grave implications” and “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.”
Citing “scientific studies,” the pontiff said that “most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.”
“Every effort to protect and improve our world entails profound changes in lifestyles, models of production and consumption, and the established structures of power which today govern societies,” he warned.
