Faith Formation: Laudato Si

Laudato Si: On Care of Our Common Home

Laudato Si is Pope Francis' encyclical on the care of our common home. It treats the crisis facing our common home that results from excessive individualism, rampant consumerism, environmental degradation, and oppression of the poor. Pope Francis also calls us to action to recognize the dignity inherent in God's creation and to save our common home. This blog, inspired by the Holy Father's encyclical, offers reflections designed to change our way of thinking about God's creation and practical actions that we can take to save our common home.

Laudato Si Resources

  • Creation Care Network, which aims to provide inspiration, education, and advocacy for Pope Francis’ call to heed the “cry of Earth and cry of the poor.”
  • Laudato Si Action Platform, a collaborative effort of the Vatican, Catholic organizations, and all people of goodwill to act to save our common home.
  • Laudato Si Movement, which aims to mobilize the Catholic community the Catholic community to care for our common home and achieve climate and ecological justice.
  • Laudato Si, the Vatican's official Laudato Si-related website devoted to publicizing Laudato Si and emphasizing actions taken to preserve our common home and promote the wellbeing of the poor.
  • Catholic Climate Covenant, an organization formed in 2006 devoted to the twin tasks of preserving our common home and caring for the world's poor.
  • Seattle University Center for Environmental Justice and Sustainability, which includes a wealth of information on practical action that we can take to save our common home.
  • Laudato Si class at St. John Vianney on YouTube. The class that inspired our Laudato Si blog.
  • Catholics Called to Care for Our Common Home, an event held at St. John Vianney on March 1, 2023. It consists of a reflection on the meaning of dominion in the first creation story in the book of Genesis and a pesentation on climate change by Jeff Renner, retired Chief Meteorologist at King Television in Seattle.

 

Practical Actions

What Is the Cost of the Meat We Eat?

By Laudato Si | August 21, 2023 | Comments Off on What Is the Cost of the Meat We Eat?

If you’ve ever driven through parts of the San Juaquin Valley in Central California, you’ve probably noticed the stench and, quite possibly, had difficulty breathing. The stench and foul air come from factory farms whose animal waste is emitted as ammonia from lagoons and combines with other molecules in the air to become ammonia nitrate.…

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Bees (and Other Pollinators) and Pesticides Don’t Mix

By Laudato Si | August 2, 2023 | Comments Off on Bees (and Other Pollinators) and Pesticides Don’t Mix

America’s bees are dying at an alarming rate. Some of us may see that as a good thing; the fewer bees (and wasps, and other stinging insects), the fewer stings. But bees are pollinators of about 70 to 100 major crops, ranging from apples and blueberries to watermelon and zucchini. There’s a simple equation: the…

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Drink Wine with Natural Cork Stoppers!

By Laudato Si | May 18, 2023 | Comments Off on Drink Wine with Natural Cork Stoppers!

When we open a wine bottle with a natural cork, we often don’t appreciate that the cork was once a living thing, harvested from the cork oak tree, a species of evergreen oak tree found primarily in southern Portugal, southern Spain, and in northwest Africa. The trees themselves play an important role in western Mediterranean…

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Recycling Styrofoam at SJV

By Laudato Si | September 20, 2022 | Comments Off on Recycling Styrofoam at SJV

On the surface, styrofoam appears to be completely innocuous. It is durable, which makes it invaluable for packaging fragile items. It retains heat well without becoming excessively hot, making it perfect as containers for hot beverages such as coffee and tea, as well as for take-out foods. Despite its durability and strength, it is also…

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Shampoo and Environmental Responsibility

By Laudato Si | February 15, 2022 | Comments Off on Shampoo and Environmental Responsibility

We all intuitively believe, as John Wesley expressed it in a sermon, that “cleanliness is indeed next to godliness.” And so often unthinkingly and with the best of intentions, we wash our dishes, do our laundry, and shower, and shampoo our hair. Most commonly, we focus on the short-term result for ourselves and are unaware…

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Wolves and Viable Ecosystems

By Laudato Si | January 18, 2022 | Comments Off on Wolves and Viable Ecosystems

In 2020, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The self-accolades accompanying the delisting noted that the recovery of grey wolf populations in the continental United States was a remarkable achievement that spanned half a century. Confined to northern Minnesota and nearby Isle Royale, Michigan, in the…

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Alternatives to Chemical Pesticides

By Laudato Si | December 21, 2021 | Comments Off on Alternatives to Chemical Pesticides

Often, when we see a pest, such as an unwanted species of wildlife, an insect, a slug or a snail, we feel no qualms about eliminating it, typically by using a chemical pesticide or poison. This is an anthropocentric approach; it reflects our assumption that God has made us lords of his creation to do…

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What We’re Doing Differently

By Laudato Si | December 7, 2021 | Comments Off on What We’re Doing Differently

Our weekly blog posts aim at providing practical steps that we each can take to defend our common home, as well as discuss ways in which we can change our way of thinking about science, about our relationship to the world around us, and about our understanding of our faith. Our hope is that, through…

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Organic Herbicides as Alternatives to Chemical Herbicides

By Laudato Si | November 16, 2021 | Comments Off on Organic Herbicides as Alternatives to Chemical Herbicides

In Are We the Pests We’re Getting Rid of?, we discussed the damage that pesticides do to the environment and to human health. Rather than using chemical pesticides, a wide range of safe organic alternatives are available, many of them with specific targets. In this post, we’ve listed some common alternatives to herbicides – that…

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Are We the Pests We’re Getting Rid of?

By Laudato Si | November 9, 2021 | Comments Off on Are We the Pests We’re Getting Rid of?

A common view of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides is that, after we apply them, they’re effective for a certain length of time, sooner or later lose their effectiveness, and then somehow magically disappear without a trace. Although it is true that the effective shelf-life of these products is limited, their magical disappearance is not. Instead,…

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Reflections

Forward Thinking and Living in History

By Laudato Si | September 13, 2023 | Comments Off on Forward Thinking and Living in History

As Christians, we believe that God entered human history in a very forceful and dramatic way through the Incarnation. Yet He did so in a way that did not destroy or overturn human history, but rather that was based on human history at the same time that it transcended it. St. Matthew begins his Gospel…

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Have We Forgotten How to Weep?

By Laudato Si | May 29, 2023 | Comments Off on Have We Forgotten How to Weep?

“Have we forgotten how to weep?” Pope Francis asked that question in his July 2013 visit to the Italian island of Lampedusa, a major port of entry for migrants and asylum seekers from North Africa and the Mideast, to commemorate those who perished when crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa. Unfortunately, as if to emphasize…

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Dominion and Eschatology

By Laudato Si | October 5, 2022 | Comments Off on Dominion and Eschatology

That the two creation stories appear to differ in defining humankind’s relationship to God’s creation has sparked endless debate about precisely what role humankind plays in managing God’s creation. In the first creation story (Genesis 1:1-2:3), humankind is given dominion over God’s earthly creation (Genesis 1:26,28). In the second (Genesis 2:4-2:25), the mandate given to…

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Conflict, Ethics, and the Problem of Fossil Fuels

By Laudato Si | March 15, 2022 | Comments Off on Conflict, Ethics, and the Problem of Fossil Fuels

In the midst of the human crisis currently unfolding in the Ukraine, it is perhaps useful to reflect on another, and potentially far more deadly, one that underlies it. While the United States has banned the import of Russian oil and natural gas, EU members have only agreed to significantly curtail the consumption of Russian…

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We Are Not Free Agents!

By Laudato Si | March 1, 2022 | Comments Off on We Are Not Free Agents!

Modern American culture is distinguished by its sharp focus on the individual. One of the great myths of our time is that we are free agents; that is, that society is merely a collection of individuals who make rational choices as they pursue their individual self-interest. Sometimes, this spirit of individualism is even more prevalent…

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Called To Be a People of Sacrifice

By Laudato Si | February 1, 2022 | Comments Off on Called To Be a People of Sacrifice

In the missionary discourse, Jesus tells us that a disciple “who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:38) In part, Jesus was speaking literally of the many Christian martyrs who were to follow Jesus to their deaths. But he was also speaking figuratively. The Last Supper helps…

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Respecting the Animal Life Around Us

By Laudato Si | January 4, 2022 |

With the return of some semblance of “normal” life amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, almost all animal rescue organizations have noted a troubling trend: animals adopted during the pandemic are now being returned, with the result that shelters are overwhelmed and often have more animals than they can realistically hope to adopt. This is a…

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Reflections on Six Months of the Laudato Si Blog

By Laudato Si | November 30, 2021 | Comments Off on Reflections on Six Months of the Laudato Si Blog

We’ve now been writing these weekly blog posts for half a year (or, more precisely, for 28 weeks, although who’s counting?). This seems like an appropriate time to summarize six months of posts, including both our practical calls to action and our reflections on science and faith. Despite the severity of the environmental and human…

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Will God Save Us from Ourselves?

By Laudato Si | October 26, 2021 | Comments Off on Will God Save Us from Ourselves?

A common argument that Christians advance to refute climate change is either that it is a politically fashionable dogma that remains unproven, or that climate change is real but unrelated to human activity. In any case, the argument goes, as Christians we believe in the word of God, and in Genesis, God promised to “never…

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Is the Second Coming Approaching?

By Laudato Si | October 19, 2021 | Comments Off on Is the Second Coming Approaching?

Pope Francis writes that “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain” (Laudato Si, 161). What does he mean by that? Does he mean that the end of the world and the second coming of Christ are at hand? That attempts to determine when Christ is coming are no longer misplaced or…

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