After last year’s Laudato Si speech held by Pope Francis, Catholics are going green. A lot of parishes decided to implement eco-friendly changes in their churches and their homes thanks to the awareness spread by the current Pope.
For example, Kansas’ St. Thomas Parish nominated a green team a short time after the encyclical (a formal papal letter usually sent to all of the Catholic bishops).
This team was busy over the past year. They replaced the church’s lighting with eco-friendly LED lighting, installed state of the art solar panels on the school and the church, and invested in sturdy recycle bins that were placed in all of the town’s meeting spaces.
For June 12th, the green team was planning to treat the parishioners with coffee (served in biodegradable cups, of course), doughnuts, and a video featuring Pope Francis, which is entitled “Care for Creation.”
The video in question tackles the subject of climate change and how humans should protect the planet that God offered them.
Furthermore, the team that organized the event gave a couple of sturdy advice for the parishioners that attended last Sunday’s mass.
The men and women were advised to:
- Explore nature more by taking longer walks in the parks and
- Study the encyclical and discuss some of the passages that they don’t understand with their family or friends.
- Try and reduce the waste of food. If food in the fridge is starting to show signs that it’s going to spoil, people can always cook it and take it to a shelter where others need it.
- Donating to Water.org, an organization that makes sure that everybody gets a drink of clean water, daily.
- Walking, taking the bus or carpooling. The environment is in dire need of less automobile pollution.
Catholics are going green at the advice of Pope Francis. Besides the fact that they are doing everything in their power to protect the planet, they are also more invested in helping others.
“We are making sure the moral imperative that Pope Francis talks about in terms of the impact of climate change on the poor is one of the things that we’re focused on,” declared Jody Craig, one of the green team members.
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Image source: Wikipedia