Intensify ‘ecological ministries’ at community level, says Filipina nun

A Filipina nun and environmental advocate said that one of the most practical and effective ways to address the worsening climate crisis is to intensify ecological ministries at the community level, particularly at the diocesan and parish levels.

We have to intensify and systematize our ecological ministries in the parishes [and] in the diocese because we need these ministries in our time… We need to organize the political power of our people because [they] can do much [and] are faced and confronted by the extreme weather conditions,” said Sr. Maria Vida Cordero, a Franciscan nun residing in the Aurora Province in the Philippines.

On October 20, during the Laudato Si' Movement's online webinar about Pope Francis' second environmental document, Laudate Deum, she gave a testimony about her ecological outreach to remote areas.

She stressed how ecological ministries can play an important role in addressing this particular shortcoming of the Church.

“We have so many very good Catholics... but because of a lack of education and information on the environment, they do not know that some of the lifestyles [and the] technology around us are destroying our neighbors on the planet. We are destroying our companions in our common home,” she said.”

“That's why I am suggesting that we intensify education in its new comprehensive form, whether in the school-based, seminary, religious education, formation, community-based, or our Catholic ethics, including the different preparations for our young for baptism [and] for our candidates for marriage,” she further said.

She called for transformation in the rules and regulations of Church organizations that might be useful in solving the climate crisis “without losing our identity as Christians and believers.”

Sr. Cordero also underlined the importance of measuring progress in the fight against climate crisis not through numbers, figures, and money but through human experience.

“Most of the time I am in remote communities with the people. We need more information, sciences, faith-based systems, and all these ecosystems involving humans,” the Franciscan nun said.

“Humans are deciding for the biodiversity [and] for the ecosystems. And therefore, we have to understand them.  We have to get to know more of them. We have to intensify our action in the community,” she explained.

Sr. Cordero further discussed the urgent need to respond to the call to save the environment, pointing out how everything is interconnected with one another.

Pope Francis’ latest Apostolic Exhortation, Laudate Deum, serves as a continuation to his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si.

With the release of this document, Pope Francis became the first-ever pontiff to write two documents having the same theme.- Luke Godoy