Andrew's Blog

November 2021 Blog

11/6/2021

by Andrew Conradi, ofs; JPIC & Laudato si' Animator
who acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.
I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism and cultural genocide.

I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation

Lest we forget & St Pope Paul VI, 1972

www.archtoronto.org

Hurrah – Finally - Thank God!

OTTAWA, October 27, 2021 –The Catholic Bishops of Canada are grateful that Pope Francis has accepted their invitation to visit Canada on a pilgrimage of healing and reconciliation. The Holy Father’s full statement on the matter can be found here.

In anticipation of this visit, the planned delegation of Indigenous survivors, Elders, knowledge keepers and youth will travel to the Holy See, where they will have the opportunity to speak to Pope Francis about the timing, focus, and themes in preparation for his future pilgrimage to Canada. “The Bishops of Canada have been engaged in meaningful discussions with Indigenous Peoples, especially those affected by Residential Schools who have shared stories about the suffering and challenges that they continue to experience,” said CCCB President, the Most Rev. Raymond Poisson. “We pray that Pope Francis’ visit to Canada will be a significant milestone in the journey toward reconciliation and healing.”

Truth, goodness and beauty

George Pennier, a Coast Salish artist, shared a dream about healing with Bishop Gary Gordon of Victoria, BC in 1998. Bishop Gary was so moved by the dream, he commissioned the above carving which depicts Chiwatenhwa (Joseph), a Huron Chief, and Echon (St. Jean de Brébeuf), circled by an eagle spindle whorl drum, representing the Spirit and the Creator; the two leaders working together in hope for a good path forward for future generations.

One of the most telling details of St. Jean de Brébeuf’s life of a Jesuit missioner in Canada in the early decades of the 1600s, is found in the name the Huron people gave him — Echon. One translation means “healing tree,” a reference to Brébeuf’s height and gentle nature. The alternative translation, however, “one who carries a heavy burden,” speaks to the spiritual life of the most famous of the men known collectively as the Canadian Martyrs.

The Jesuits were assisted in Huronia by a number of new believers, amongst whom were Joseph Chiwatenhwa and his wife Marie Aonetta, and other members of his family, all of whom "lived and witnessed to their faith in a heroic manner."[1] Chiwatenhwa was deeply moved by the Christian teachings of the Jesuit missioners in 1636 when he first encountered them, despite the fact that others of his Huron tribe blamed these missionaries for the epidemics that had broken out in Huron lands.

Chiwatenhwa himself fell sick; after his recovery, however, he was baptized, on August 16, 1637, by St. Jean de Brébeuf, and given the Christian name Joseph. His wife, Aonetta, was baptized on March 19, 1638; her Christian name was Marie. Their marriage was blessed on the same day; this was the first Catholic wedding in Huronia. Joseph became the first lay administrator in the Catholic Church in Canada, in 1639.

He helped the Jesuits translate hymns and prayers from French into Huron. [Listen and watch the famous Jesous ahatonhia Huron Carol by Heather Dale in Huron, French, English and American sign language although St Jean de Brébeuf himself is credited with the lyrics]. Chiwatenhwa was impressed with the Jesuit teachings. During his eight-day silent retreat, he composed a prayer that reveals his profound experience with Jesus: "You love us so deeply that all I can do in return is to offer myself to you. I chose you as my elder and chief. There is no one else." In adopting his new faith, Chiwatenhwa /Joseph drew on many of the spiritual and cultural teachings of his people; he entered the Catholic Church as a Huron. This helped him spread the Gospel (Good News) to many members of his family and tribe.

Joseph Chiwatenhwa sensed that he might eventually be killed for his faith and love for Jesus Christ. He was martyred on 2 August 1640, aged 38. Jesuit martyr of New France Gabriel Lalemant considered Chiwatenhwa a great catechist amongst his own people, "their apostle." Pope John Paul II honoured the spirituality of Chiwatenhwa and his family when Native Canadians gathered in Huronia to meet him in September 1984. The Pope said that Joseph Chiwatenhwa and his wife, Marie Aonetta, with his brother and other relatives, "lived and witnessed to their faith in a heroic manner.

"These men and women," he continued, "not only professed their faith and embraced Christ's love, but they in turn became evangelizers and provide even today eloquent models for lay ministry." The Pope acknowledged the Native tradition and expressed his joy in the Native Canadian church. "These new Christians," he said, "knew by instinct that the gospel, far from destroying their authentic values

and customs, had the power to purify and uplift the cultural heritage which they had received." "Christ," said the Pope at Huronia, "in the members of his body, is himself Indian.”

KONDIARONK, an architect of The Great Peace of Montreal was another Jesuit convert who was widely and greatly respected by Indigenous and French alike.

Silent no more

Left: Photo of Delacina Chief Eagle by Deborah Anderson I can imagine the Maple Leaf instead
of the Stars and Stripes over her mouth! Apparently the Vogue cover is a fake. Too bad!

Photographer and film-director, Deborah Anderson’s “Women of the White Buffalo”, chronicles a movement of healing and hope through the voices of Native American Lakota women living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, USA.
[There are Lakota in Manitoba and Saskatchewan also]. Their powerfully rich stories inspire strength while providing insight that speaks to current environmental and cultural crises withstanding the test of time. Deeply-rooted with history and culture, learn about Anderson’s visual journey with the Lakota tribe that brought her award-winning documentary and photographic series to life. See trailer (1:58)

The picture above left speaks volumes as to the suppression, oppression, and silencing of the Indigenous people. Tribal elders said: “We murder and rape our indigenous women, we murder and rape the Earth. Meth addiction breeds sex trafficking by creating debt, it’s rampant and goes unreported on the reservation.” What caused this? Not restricted to First Nations, but for them made worse by: “hundreds of years of genocide?”

Interesting map of world's indigenous peoples
(Thank you Hermy Villasenor ofs)

FOLLOWING ARE SEVERAL NUTSHELLS

“Long before Columbus, indigenous peoples practiced slavery, human sacrifice, torture, racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism, and much more that we would object to today alongside their great achievements. And those who believe that the indigenous had escaped Original Sin and were innocents living in perfect harmony with God, nature, and one another, have set themselves up for deep disillusion when they actually look into the record.” (Father Seán Connolly ...Read more)

[True, but slavery etc was not restricted to First Nations and absolutely no excuse for Christian complicity in what the Indian Act and residential schools inflicted on First Nations!]

As Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh John McDowell said about the partition of Ireland in 1921:
“Too often we allowed the attitudes around us to shape our faith, rather than the other way around.” Strikes me the same could be said about the Indian Act and Canadian Indian Residential Schools!

Capitalism and the Environment
Forests, peatlands, deserts and tundra can all absorb and hold stocks of carbon-dioxide (CO2). Of all the carbon held in land-based ecosystems, around 34% can be found in grasslands, data from the World Resources Institute show. That's not much less than the 39% held in forests. [So look after all of Mother Earth and especially regenerate the soil].

Photo by Milo Weiler on Unsplash

Pope Francis: “An unfettered pursuit of money rules. That is the dung of the devil." “Trashing the planet and hiding the money isn’t a perversion of capitalism. It is capitalism.” George Monbiot [Time to uproot the system! Change the system, not the climate!]

Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction. “Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.” Antonio Guterres (UN Secretary-General António Guterres)

The increasing and extreme economic inequality in the world is rooted in an ideology of individualism in which investments and prosperity are aimed only at driving profit not helping the common good, said Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, Vatican foreign minister. … "A new ethics of the common good" is needed to guide policy making so measures will be "capable of both tackling the structural inequalities behind our deeply divided and increasingly fragile world and unleashing the spirit of human ingenuity and creativity, which is urgently needed to build back better from the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic," he said.

"From a Catholic point of view, I think if we care about God's Earth, if we care about creation, if we care about the poor, if we care about our children, and if we care about the unborn children of today, we need to be engaged with this," [COP 26 ] said Lorna Gold, board chair of the Laudato Si' Movement, who has attended previous climate summits.

The climate crisis explained in 10 charts here

‘Faith is not neutral’ in caring for creation writes Michael Swan. Pope Francis isn’t going to let the next global summit on climate change slip by on the same old excuses and empty promises — and Development and Peace - Caritas Canada aims to see Canadian Catholics play their part. Development and Peace - Caritas Canada has dedicated this year to a campaign headlined “People and Planet First.
“But our faith is not neutral when it comes to the dignity of all persons, to care for creation and to the political and economic structures that affect people and the planet.” said Development and Peace campaign officer Kathleen Cross. So please Take action

Popular movements key to social change, pope says.
Pope Francis said: he realises some people, including within the Church, consider him to be "a pest" for defending the poor and most vulnerable, but that it won't stop him as it is part of Christianity. [Me too!]
Pope Francis Laudato Si' 179: “Society, … must put pressure on governments … . Unless citizens control political power … it will not be possible to control damage to the environment.” As another pest said to the BBC, Greta Thunberg: 'We need public pressure, not just summits' We need action not pretence (7 min speech to Austrian Climate Meeting) She is so articulate; right to the point!

The difficulties the Church faces are many — its relationship with women, the majority of Catholics who reject the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, the negative and defensive posture of the Church in the culture, its embrace of colonialism at the expense of Indigenous people, divisions over liturgy, doctrine and culture and the haemorrhaging of young people. But it’s clericalism and the exercise of authority at the centre of all of it, according to the Sister of Charity of Halifax Nula Kenny In her new book for Novalis, A Post-Pandemic Church, Prophetic Possibilities, Kenny lays out an agenda for a Canadian synod. It’s an agenda for a Church in crisis and a resurrection moment, Sr Nuala Kenny said.

"The opposite of clericalism is co-responsibility — lay, religious, and ordained leaders working together to advance the mission of the church," said Robinson, speaking about the Synod.

A group has formed to track Synod progress across the country, and are inviting participation from concerned Catholic laity. See Concerned Lay Catholics. And please send any local information about the synodal process in your diocese or parish to concernedlaycatholics@gmail.com using Synodality in the subject box.

Study: Most US Catholic bishops kept silent on Francis' climate change push. Almost as soon as the document was published, however, the U.S. bishops showed signs that they would largely ignore the pope's exhortation in their teachings and action.
In more than 12,000 columns by U.S. bishops between 2014 and 2019 — the period directly before and after the publication of Francis' social encyclical on the environment — only 93 mentioned climate change, global warming or their equivalent at all. Our research shows clearly that U.S. Catholic bishops' communications collectively diminished the impact of the encyclical on climate change. Overall, American Catholic bishops have been overwhelmingly silent about climate change. Our findings raise questions about whether U.S. Catholic bishops will embrace the Vatican's new Laudato Si' Action Platform. Our findings also suggest the U.S. bishops are squandering opportunities to connect with youth and young adults who as a demographic prioritize climate change. The U.S. Catholic Church has unprecedented capacity to help avoid climate catastrophe. It also has a responsibility to address the climate emergency as an essential part of its mission.

In Canada, in 2015 the CCCB did sign on to an interfaith declaration on climate change & poverty reduction. They did put out Living Out Laudato Si: A Commentary and Practical Resource for Canadian Catholics in 2017. Also available is the video, Laudato Si’, A Canadian Response found here. with a follow-up video to that 2015 video,: found here.
But is it enough? I, for one, do not think so. In June 2019 the Ontario bishops’ justice and peace commission asked the CCCB to lobby governments to declare a climate emergency. The request was passed up the ladder to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, but Redemptorist Fr. Paul Hansen, former chair of Kairos and member of the Ontario assembly of bishops’ justice and peace commission, doubted the CCCB would act and I can find nothing on the CCCB website that says it did. Sadly my own diocese is not in the forefront in promoting Laudato si’ or Season of Creation. The Laudato Si’ Action Platform is not on my (Victoria, BC) diocesan website and it was a bit slow to post about the Synod which it did at last on 3 Nov. Alleluia! That is another reason we must get involved in the Synod process and tell them to get behind Pope Francis!

To the bishops, Canadian and US: Hear our voices and join us, lead us.

BEAUTY

Donna Schweider @caterinachinsky

Lawren Harris, founder of the Group of Seven: The spirituality of his art: the metaphysics of this Canadian’s abstract landscapes where the universe sings especially in what we do call Sister Mother Earth, and could call Brother Mountain and Sister Iceberg.

“The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.” (Pope Francis, 2015, Laudato Si’, 84)

Lawren S. Harris (1885-1970), McMichael Canadian Art Collection

Mt. Lefroy, 1930 [Brother Mountain?] & Icebergs, Davis Strait, 1930 [Sister Iceberg?]

Algoma Country, 1948 [Our Sister Mother Earth]

“I arise today, through The strength of heaven, The light of the sun, The radiance of the moon, The splendour of fire, The speed of lightning, The swiftness of wind, The depth of the sea, The stability of the earth, The firmness of rock.” This excerpt from the Lorica (or Breastplate) of St Patrick reveals Celtic Christianity’s love of creation and is only one part of our tradition in this regard. Joanne M Pierce wrote more about the origins of the Christian tradition of connection to nature. St Francis of Assisi is well known for this and was preceded by St. Hildegard of Bingen, (died A.D. 1179) a visionary and mystic, who became especially connected with environmental concerns. A German Benedictine abbess, she was one of the most accomplished women of the Middle Ages. She insisted that God loved the Earth as a husband loves a wife, and espoused a kind of "green" theology, called viriditas, condemning the harm that human activity could do to nature. She wrote: “The earth sustains humanity. It must not be injured; it must not be destroyed.” Hildegard has been acclaimed as an unofficial patron saint of environmentalists. In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI declared her a doctor of the church.

Water Warrior & Climate Warrior

I have written previously about Autumn. Above pic is from Meanwhile in Canada.

AUTUMN PELTIER and GRETA THUNBERG | Special Event | TIFF 2020 (video 32.09 mins)

HIGHLY RECOMMEND YOU LOOK AT THIS:
CIOFS Franciscan JPIC website

Here is one part:
Intro to Laudato Si Action Platform (by Sr Nancy Kinsey, FCJM)
(it might take a minute or so to open the above Intro link!)

Help to cultivate Eco-conversion and develop a vibrant Laudato si’ culture,
following the “See-Judge-Act methodology.

Something else to consider: Inter-Franciscan Commission for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (informally known as Romans VI) has turned a webinar on “Laudato Si” into an online self-study course. The “Laudato Si” Action Platform course incorporates video, PowerPoints and text from the webinar’s morning and afternoon presentations. The morning presentations are posted, with the afternoon session expected to be available soon, on the Franciscan JPIC website.

All part of see, judge, act but Friar Blay concentrates on see and judge in this diagram.
FVC/ TCG strongly believes that unless spirituality leads to action it is incomplete!

When asked what are the most important commandments, Jesus, according to Mk 12:28b-34, replied: (quoting Deuteronomy 6:4): "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Jesus continues with a second commandment from Leviticus 19:18: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” He adds: “There is no commandment greater than these.”

Fratelli tutti: “122. Development must not aim at the amassing of wealth by a few, but must ensure “human rights – personal and social, economic and political, including the rights of nations and of peoples”.[99] The right of some to free enterprise or market freedom cannot supersede the rights of peoples and the dignity of the poor, or, for that matter, respect for the natural environment, for “if we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all”.[100]” ([99] Saint John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (30 December 1987), 33: AAS 80 (1988), 557.[100] Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (24 May 2015), 95: AAS 107 (2015), 885.)

Canada spent at least $18 billion dollars in 2020 propping up the very companies most responsible for the climate crisis. This must not continue. Why do we subsidize them? When Oil and gas companies expected to generate $21 billion in cash flow in excess of expenses over the course of next year according to The Financial Post Geoffrey Morgan.

The Wedzin Kwa (Morrice River, BC)

Photos: left: The Georgia Straight, centre: The Narwhal, right: Sleydo' a.k.a Molly Wickham

The Wedzin Kwa (Morrice River) is one of the few remaining pristine waterways where water is drinkable without treatment and home to multiple species of salmon.

@Gidimten land defenders connect the genocide of stolen Indigenous children in this country with the ongoing land defence struggle to protect the sacred Wedzin Kwa headwaters from the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline. #WetsuwetenStrong
Gidimt'en spokesperson Sleydo', a.k.a. Molly Wickham, describes the RCMP as acting as mercenaries for industry. Sleydo' was among 14 people arrested at the Gidimt'en Checkpoint on 7 January 2019 when heavily armed Mounties arrived to enforce a B.C. Supreme Court injunction obtained by Coastal Gaslink Pipeline Ltd.

The RCMP were also implicated in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG)’s final report, which states that the “historic role of the RCMP has not changed significantly. The RCMP must still enforce present-day discriminatory and oppressive legislation and policies in areas such as child welfare and land and resource disputes.” The institution has a history of militarized enforcement when Indigenous communities organize to stand for Indigenous sovereignty.
Wet’suwet’en land defenders and supporters are occupying a Coastal GasLink pipeline worksite on Gidimt’en clan territory in northwest B.C. in an effort to prevent drilling under the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River, BC), raising fears about escalating police actions.

The location, just upriver from the Unist’ot’en healing centre, is where TC Energy plans to lay pipe to connect fracking facilities in the northeast to the LNG Canada processing plant, currently under construction in Kitimat, B.C.

In 1997, the Wet'suwet'en Hereditary Chiefs (and the Gitxsan Nation) fought and won the most important case on aboriginal title in Canada in the Delgamuukw decision, wherein the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) recognized that, where treaties have not been signed, underlying title continues to rest with the Indigenous nation. Stemming from a 1984 case launched by Wet'suwet'en and Gitxsan leadership to establish jurisdiction over 58,000 square kilometres of land and water in northwest British Columbia, this SCC Delgamuukw decision recognizes our authority to govern unceded territory and establishes that our title has never been extinguished. Thus, 'Anic 'niwh'it'én, Canadian, and international law all dictate that all levels of government have the obligation to seek the consent of leaders with governing authority over the territory in question, and that failure to do so is in direct violation of Indigenous peoples' rights. In summary, the Coastal GasLink pipeline contravenes Wet'suwet'en, federal, and international laws. It is an illegal project. [Yes, but unfortunately there are contradictory laws and the RCMP have to obey injunctions. Or could they refuse? Could they cite Delgamuukw or the 2014 Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, or the Blueberry River decision, in which a B.C. Supreme Court judge ruled in June 2021 that the provincial government had breached the nation's rights under Treaty 8, signed more than 120 years ago, because it allowed development such as forestry and natural gas extraction without the nation's approval?]

Members of the RCMP’s Community-Industry Response Group, a tactical unit familiar to old-growth protesters at Fairy Creek, where more than 1,000 arrests were made and the conduct of officers was called into question by a B.C. Supreme Court judge, have been coming into the camp daily. In the first days of the Wet’suwet’en blockade at Wedzin Kwa, two people were arrested — one shocked with a Taser and the other subjected to physical force. [And I thought the RCMP, was meant to Uphold the law! After all that’s what their motto “Maintiens le droit,” usually translated as Uphold the right, also means! Instead they are arresting people. Oh silly me! At one point in my life I thought about joining the RCMP and actually, I feel sorry for them since they are caught in the middle because they have to enforce other contradictory laws, which of course, they did not make. Once again we see clearly that law and justice are not the same thing.] Read more: Read The Narwal's explainer

Finally (!) check this out: Recycling was a lie to sell more plastics by guess who?
And this: The deliberate (criminal?) climate denial campaign (47 mins video)

Peace & joy, Andrew, ofs

0 Comments

October 2021 Blog

10/8/2021

0 Comments

by Andrew Conradi, ofs; JPIC & Laudato si' Animator

who acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.
I am deeply sorry for the injustices inflicted upon the First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples in Turtle Island by the complicity of settlers in the colonialism inherent in the Indian Act and Residential Schools including racism and cultural genocide.

I commit to work for truth, healing and reconciliation.

George Pennier, a Coast Salish artist, shared a dream about healing with Bishop Gary Gordon of Victoria, BC in 1998. Bishop Gary was so moved by the dream, he commissioned this carving which depicts Chiwatenwa (Joseph), a Huron Chief, and Echon (St. Jean de Brébeuf), circled by an eagle spindle whorl drum, representing the Spirit and the Creator; the two leaders working together in hope for a good path forward for future generations.

ELECTIONS ANYONE?
Hope you voted and kept a sense of humour!
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose!

(Source: Blue Guerilla 4 Sept 2021 via Lila Simpson-Lund. Thank you, Dear Lila)

 The Feast of St Francis and Thanksgiving

Hope you had a spirit filled celebration of the Feast of St Francis of Assisi and had opportunity give thanks for Creation. I thank Fr. Manoj Xalxo, OFM for his reflection. So inspiring!

Video: A World of Gratitude | Season of Creation 2021 (6:29)

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet - This reflection is based on #Mercy2Earth developed by the Laudato Si' Movement

LAUDATO SI' ACTION PLATFORM
Launch pushed back to mid-November

Vatican plans 40 days of prayer (share with your parish and community), promotion ahead of sustainability initiative rollout. Originally set for Oct. 4, the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, the Laudato Si' Action Platform is now scheduled to begin its enrollment period on Nov. 14. By that time, planning guides and related materials for the program — a type of sustainability road map guided by church teaching — are expected to all be completed and made available on the initiative's website.

Meanwhile, the Vatican Dicastery [Department] for Promoting Integral Human Development, which is leading the project, has planned a 40-day prayer and promotion campaign to increase awareness and build greater momentum around the action platform. It also plans to release some initial resources on the website Oct. 4, along with a list of events to take place before the new launch date.

In a letter announcing the new campaign, Cardinal Peter Turkson, prefect of the dicastery, formally invited Catholic organizations to join the Laudato Si' initiative during what he called "this crucial decade" for "radical societal transformation" as increasing climate change and environmental degradation threaten both the planet's ecosystems and people.

The new target date, Nov. 14, is the World Day of the Poor, which Francis established in November 2016. The launch will also follow a major U.N. climate conference, COP26, to be held in Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 1-12. That could be symbolic, Kureethadam told working group members, because once the conference is over, "we get to do action."

In anticipation of COP26, Francis hosted a gathering of faith leaders and scientists at the Vatican Oct. 4, which also concluded the ecumenical Season of Creation. They produced a statement to world leaders stressing the moral urgency of substantial action at the Glasgow summit. Along with the Pope, were Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Grand Imam of al-Azhar, Ahmed el-Tayeb and representatives of Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism and Jainism. They were also joined by scientists who had helped draft the declaration. “We have inherited a garden; we must not leave a desert to our children” said an appeal signed by those who gathered. Christine Allen, director of CAFOD, the Catholic development agency for England and Wales, told Vatican News on Monday that "it's really quite unprecedented, isn't it, for so many faith leaders to come together in this way.”

Paz Artaza-Regan, told EarthBeat in an email that the delay is to ensure that a large and complicated project is fully vetted before its release. "In the spirit of synodality, the Vatican wishes to ensure that the Platform fully reflects the needs and concerns of every region of the world, that it provides all the regionally relevant resources, and that it works well before launching," she said.

Invoking the spirit of St Francis at the very beginning of the Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, social solidarity is explained as a blessedness of loving those who are near to us and those who are far away (no. 1). The universal message of St Francis with which Fratelli Tutti starts is one of sowing the seeds of peace and walking alongside those who are poor, abandoned, infirm and outcast, the least of all brothers and sisters (no. 2).

As identified in Laudato Si and Fratelli Tutti, it is clear that some of the most immediate political challenges of the early 21st century require co-ordination and international agreement, including climate change, supporting biodiversity and environmental sustainability, reigning in destructive economic libertarianism and corporate greed, and recognising the rights of refugees and migrants and the dignity of the poorest people on our planet. Fratelli Tutti elevates politics to a “lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good” (FT. 180).

One way Pope Francis hopes to achieve this is synodality.

SYNODALITY

Did you hear about this?
The Diocesan Phase of the Synodal Process 2021-2023 is an opportunity to listen more deeply to the voice of the Spirit, enhance participation and outreach, improve the quality of dialogue, discern about further issues, strengthen conversion in attitudes and skills, and animate people's sense of connection between the local, regional, and global church.

Worldwide synod begins at local level. There has never been a synod like the one that will begin Oct. 17 in cathedrals across Canada. It’s not that lay people have never before been asked their opinion, but this Synod on Synodality begins with their opinions and from that moment on it will be about their hopes, dreams, disappointments and opinions — including the opinions of Catholics who have walked away from Church.

Pope Francis invites the whole Church to question itself on synodality: a decisive theme for the life and mission of the Church. This site will accompany the two-year journey (2021-2023) of reflection and sharing of the whole Church. [That includes you and me!]

As stated in the Preparatory Document, the Synod considers a main question: How is our “walking together” in synodality realized today in the Church? What steps does the Spirit invite us to take in order to grow in our “walking together”? The sensus fidei of the whole People of God is sought on this question. Since each diocese has a unique context, its path for seeking, promoting, and reaping the fruits of this sensus fidei will be unique.

Overall, the Synod guidelines remind us that:

The goal is to ensure the participation of the greatest number possible, in order to listen to the living voice of the entire People of God.
This is not possible unless we make special efforts to actively reach out to people where they’re at, especially those who are often excluded or who are not involved in the life of the Church.
There must be a clear focus on the participation of the poor, marginalized, vulnerable, and excluded, in order to listen to their voices and experiences.
The Synodal Process must be simple, accessible, and welcoming for all.

Planning for such a process is already the beginning of synodal conversion! The Diocesan Contact Person(s) and Synodal Team together with the Bishop could discuss them together. We are encouraged to take a look at the Preparatory Document and Vademecum in a prayerful and reflective way.

From Hamilton (Ontario) Diocese: POPE FRANCIS HAS ANNOUNCED that the next Synod of Bishops will take place in October 2023. The theme for the Synod is: For a Synodal Church: Communion, Participation, and Mission. It will be the culmination of a “three-year path” involving the People of God at every level of the Church. Pope Francis will officially inaugurate the event on the weekend of October 9-10. The first phase of the synodal path will take place in each Diocese beginning on the weekend of October 17th, under the leadership of the Bishop. This will be marked in the Sunday liturgies in all our parishes, and most particularly at the 4 p.m. Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of Christ the King. A Synod Committee has been established … They will facilitate the synodal process so that as many parishioners as are interested in participating can be engaged. More information will be provided as the process gets underway.

[Question: Have you heard about this Diocesan Phase or a Synodal Team in your Diocese (or parish)? My pastor had heard just a couple of days ago and will take action. If yours has not, ask your Bishop and pastor about it!]

Good news:
$30M NATIONAL PLEDGE TO SUPPORT HEALING & RECONCILIATION
Monday, 27 September 2021

The Bishops of Canada, as a tangible expression of their commitment to walk with the Indigenous Peoples of this land along the pathway of hope, are making a nation-wide collective financial commitment to support healing and reconciliation initiatives for residential school survivors, their families, and their communities.

With a target of $30 million over up to five years, this will include initiatives in every region of the country. The commitment will be achieved at the local level, with parishes across Canada being encouraged to participate and amplify the effort.

Bishop Raymond Poisson, President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), expressed hope that these efforts will support meaningful projects across Canada and make a significant difference in addressing the historical and ongoing trauma caused by the residential school system.

Funding for projects will be determined locally, in consultation with First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples in each region. The Bishops of Canada have committed and tasked themselves to develop national principles and strategy, timelines, and the public communication of these collective initiatives this November.

Bad news:
Colonialism, Catholicism and role of a Bishop of St Albert, Alberta (from various sources)
Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin (1829-1902) was a key architect of the Canadian Indian residential school system, which has been labeled an instrument of cultural genocide. In June 2021, this led to governments and private businesses to begin removing his name from institutions and infrastructure previously named for him.

It was his belief that maintaining Indigenous cultural practices would lead to the self-extinction of Indigenous people. Modeled in part on reformatory prisons in France, the residential schools intended to alienate Indigenous children from their language, traditions and families, and ultimately to make them ashamed of their heritage. The schools’ aim was to replace Indigenous cultures and languages with Canada’s English and French cultures, supplemented with industrial and agricultural training. “[Bishop Grandin] boasted that the orphans educated at mission schools hated to be reminded of their Aboriginal ancestry,” according to the T.R.C. report.

Bishop Grandin’s views deeply influenced the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who operated the majority of the Catholic residential schools in Canada. Ken Thorson, O.M.I., the provincial superior of O.M.I. Lacombe Canada, said in an email to America that while the Oblates were not founded to be educators, “our charism called us to respond to the needs of the day, and so education was a hallmark of Oblate ministry in Canada, with schools, colleges and universities being established.”

“When the Canadian government began to establish Indian Residential Schools, they enlisted the assistance of the various churches primarily because they were already involved in education,” said Father Thorson. “The Oblates of the time responded, seeing the opportunity for evangelization and education.”

The Oblates of today now understand this part of their history as complicity in Canadian colonialism. “We experience deep regret about Oblate involvement in residential schools, about implementing government policy to restrict or forbid Indigenous languages and culture,” said Father Thorson.

Catholics in Canada have struggled to come to terms with such a violent history, and many are publicly leaving the church because of its participation in the residential schools and an unwillingness on the part of the hierarchy to apologize as a body. In a statement on its website, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops said that “each diocese and religious community is corporately and legally responsible for its own actions. The Catholic Church as a whole in Canada was not associated with the Residential Schools, nor was the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops.” [True but irrelevant because they finally did respond as an entity called -not surprisingly- the CCCB.]

More news:
Claims of $28M of 'in-kind' help for residential school survivors includes bible study, parish staffing as part of compensation. Questionable?

Read more "It's distressing to see this. This is ordinary church religious work repackaged as in-kind services and reconciliation. This is not legitimate," said Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, a former judge and director of the University of British Columbia's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre.
The Church has repeatedly declined to provide details of the $25-million promise of in-kind services, other than to state publicly that the amount was exceeded.

The corporation formed by the churches to oversee the 2005 deal has since been dissolved. … the Catholic Church's claims were evaluated by a committee that included members from Catholic entities, the federal government and the Assembly of First Nations. It's unclear whether that committee approved the items in the document obtained by CBC News.

[LET’S HOPE THEY DID. IF LOCAL INDIGENOUS CATHOLICS ASKED FOR IT, THAT MAKES IT RIGHT AND NOT A REASON FOR CRITICISM.]

GLOBAL CLIMATE STRIKE
24 Sept 2021, Victoria, BC

Victoria, BC, 24 Sept 2021, Global Climate Strike. Read more OFS Canada’s Little Portion Fraternity was there! Two of us marched behind Extinction Rebellion’s green canoe TELL THE TRUTH and REBEL FOR LIFE banner. Another member was nearby. Andrew was interviewed by a couple of Victoria High School students who were making a video for a class project. They photo’d his signs and he spoke about the Pope, Laudato Si’, Greta Thunberg and how everything is connected: fossil fuels, old growth forests and water, indigenous rights etc. But I have not seen their final work yet.

Andrew Conradi, ofs and Dawn d’Cruz, ofs attend Global Climate Strike, Victoria, BC, 24 Sept 2021
Photo by Julie Johnston, GreenHeartEducation

PEOPLE AND PLANET FIRST

Scenes from the police action against the Caycuse blockade Fairy Creek, BC, 18 May 2021 Photograph by Dawna Mueller (focusonvictoria.ca)

B.C. Supreme Court ends Fairy Creek injunction
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Douglas Thompson, in a judgment on Tuesday [28 Sept], ruled that the court injunction granted to Teal Cedar will not be extended, saying that the RCMP’s enforcement tactics “have led to serious and substantial infringement of civil liberties.”
The RCMP has arrested more than 1,100 protesters since the injunction took effect.

Next for Fairy Creek : Science Must Trump Politics Read more
The case for saving some of the most precious ecosystems on Earth. The direct link between logging old-growth forests and climate change has been well established.

In British Columbia, CO2 emissions from clear cutting, including the loss of standing carbon stocks as well as foregone photosynthetic uptake, exceeds the amount emitted from fossil fuels like oil and natural gas.

CARITAS CANADA
D&P Fall Action Campaign

TAKE ACTION: See the Video (1 min 34 secs) and sign the petition to the House of Commons

While global leaders are in the COP26 meetings talking about how to tackle climate change, more and more activists are being threatened and killed for protecting the forests, waters, and biodiversity that our people and our planet are most in need of. The most vulnerable members of our human family are bearing the largest burden, dealing with the worst impacts of climate change and facing negative effects of ill-planned, top-down climate “solutions”.

We know the choices we are making today will shape our communities, our economy, our health and the health of our planet for years to come, so let’s make sure our transition is towards a just economy that addresses integral human development. How can we make sure human rights are respected and environmental harm avoided as we improve our global and national climate policies? We must make sure that people and the planet are at the centre of our just recovery.

Voluntary measures are not enough
It is time to catch up! Are we ready for Canada to be a real leader in international human rights and responsible business conduct? For over a decade, Canadian companies have been expected to care for the environment and respect human rights. And yet, the lived experiences of Development and Peace partner organizations demonstrates that existing measures are not effective in preventing human and environmental abuses around the world.

We want the obligation to prevent human rights violations to be legally binding. Canadian companies will have to develop and implement human rights and environmental due diligence procedures for their entire supply and value chains, and report on it. With due diligence legislation, if a company fails to undertake reasonable steps, the victims of any harm will have access to remedy and meaningful consequences through the Canadian courts.

As Pope Francis wrote in his letter on a conference held in Assisi in 2020 entitled “Economy of Francis”:
PEOPLE AND PLANET FIRST MEANS “a different kind of economy: one that brings life not death, one that is inclusive and not exclusive, humane and not dehumanising, one that cares for the environment and does not despoil it.”

SOUNDS A BIT LIKE:

Still breathing? Lucky you!
More than 10 million people die every year from air pollution, a problem that doesn’t receive enough attention. Bloomberg article But the WHO has a plan

Nobel Peace Prize winners 2021:
Maria Ressa (Philippines) & Dimitri Muratov (Russia)
Pray for fearless journalists! We need them!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING! PEACE & JOY, ANDREW, OFS

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September 2021 Blog

9/5/2021

0 Comments

September 2021 Franciscan Voice Canada
Blog by Andrew Conradi, ofs; JPIC & Laudato si’ Animator
who acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People, (of the place to smoke herring) also known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations,
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.

Part 1: Season of Creation & Laudato si’ Action Platform
A timely reminder of why we work for justice, peace and integrity of creation

Michael Cusato, OFM, one of the foremost historians of medieval Franciscan history working in the field today was quoted in the Franciscans International website: “Together, Francis and Clare founded and inspired a movement of men and women who called for the transformation of society through a life of voluntary poverty, fraternity, and solidarity with the most marginalized—the three pillars of the Franciscan concept of minoritas. The Franciscan and Clarian insistence on minoritas (the “universal fraternity of all creation”) … is joyfully and dynamically lived out in active engagement with the world in order to affect mutual transformation. To be Franciscan … is to be in relationship with, rather than to stand apart from, those who are experiencing oppression, marginalization, and all forms of injustice.” (emphasis added). [N.B. OFS Rule 18 refers to “universal kinship” which includes our Sister Mother Earth.]

The 2021 Season of Creation 1 Sept-4 Oct is a very good way to actively engage with the world

Learn more about the Season of Creation

In a letter, (earlier this year, 24 May 2021) Monsignor Bruno-Marie Duffé, Secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, warmly invited the global Catholic family to “join the ecumenical family in celebrating the Season of Creation,” the annual celebration of prayer and action for our common home. “I humbly request your assistance in promoting this important moment in your local parishes and communities,” Msgr. Duffé wrote.

“We also encourage bishops and ecclesial bodies to make statements to raise awareness about the Season of Creation, helping the faithful to realize that ‘living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience’” (LS 217). [We might need to gently push our Bishops as well as our parish pastors! The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) did finally link to Msgr Duffé’s 24 May 2021 letter on the Season of Creation but not until 27 Aug 2021- too late to plan ahead! It does have the wholehearted support of Canada’s bishops, said CCCB spokesperson Lisa Gall: “Canada’s bishops remain steadfastly committed to encouraging the care of creation and our common home.” But the CCCB’s link is without any real additional Canadian promotional support. Makes one wonder why? Dublin Archbishop Dermot Farrell provides an Irish example of what could be done to make a statement as suggested by Msgr Duffé. Archbishop Farrell issued his own 64-page pastoral letter 30 Aug 2021 on "the climate catastrophe," and said that "the havoc of the [coronavirus] pandemic will pale compared to that of climate change."]

Join the Season of Creation by registering today and receive the free Season of Creation Celebration Guide, which is packed with ideas about how you can lead your community in caring for creation.

Duffé pointed out how next month’s ecumenical season will be a “critical moment for Catholics to lift up the voices of the most vulnerable and advocate on their behalf ahead of two important summits.” [N.B. Global Climate Strike 24 Sept - see last page.] After the Season of Creation, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) and the UN Biodiversity Convention (COP15) will take place.
Duffé wrote: “I invite you to join advocacy initiatives such as the Healthy Planet, Healthy People Petition urging for bold action to protect creation in addition to other initiatives calling for new paths forward together.” [You may have already signed this petition, because Franciscan Voice Canada promoted and linked to it under Action-Take Action earlier in July. It will be presented to world leaders at the COP 26 United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, 1-12 Nov 2021— a meeting Pope Francis plans to attend.]

Early Catholic support came in 2003 from the Catholic Bishops of the Philippines. Pope Francis and the Vatican have shown prophetic leadership around the ecumenical celebration of prayer, action, and advocacy for our common home since 2015. In 2019 and 2020 Pope Francis started the Season with a powerful papal message, encouraging Catholics to host events and protect God’s creation. He also concluded the Season the past two years by thanking Christians around the world for their efforts.

Pope Francis invites you to celebrate the 2021 Season of Creation

Sunday 29 August Pope Francis called on all people (video 38 sec) to take “decisive, urgent action” during the upcoming Season of Creation in order to “transform this crisis into an opportunity.” Speaking during his Sunday Angelus, His Holiness said the “cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor are becoming increasingly serious and alarming.” Now is the time for all people, especially Christians, to increase their commitment to our common home by doing more than ever to protect God’s creation.

Again he called for participation - General Audience Wednesday 1 Sept (video 1.07):
World Day of Prayer for Care of Creation and Season of Creation 2021

As you’ve no doubt heard, the recent United Nations climate report was extremely worrying. Our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. We still have time to create a better future, but we need to act now and scale up our efforts as much as we can!

We ask for your support once more in promoting the Healthy Planet, Healthy People petition during the upcoming ecumenical Season of Creation 2021.

The Season of Creation is the moment for a push on this campaign. It is fortuitous that this important moment in our Christian calendar – when we pray, take action, and advocate for our common home – is just before these two major UN summits [and coincides with the Canadian election.] There is no reason why we can't mobilize hundreds of thousands of people, but we need to act together during the Season of Creation to realize this potential!

Catholics’ efforts will be aided by the new Laudato Si’ Action Platform.

The Vatican-led effort will empower Catholic families; parishes and dioceses; schools and universities; hospitals; workers, businesses and farms; organizations, groups and movements; & religious orders to implement Laudato Si’. A new website LaudatoSi.va has been created to support the initiative.

The Laudato Si’ Action Platform is another way
to advocate; raise our voice; transform society;
and actively engage with the world in order to affect mutual transformation:

Bolder responses to Laudato Si' & climate change
BEGIN OR CONTINUE THE JOURNEY

On 4 October, the Feast of St. Francis, the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development will begin offering Laudato Si’ Plans. Laudato Si’ Plans help you discern and implement your response to Laudato Si’. Your institution, community, or family is invited to make an early commitment to the planning process. By completing the registration form, you pledge to pursue your Laudato Si’ Plan when the plans are formally launched.

You are warmly invited to use the resources at https://laudatosiactionplatform.org as you discern the next steps in the journey ahead.

So what exactly are Canadian Franciscans and others doing to bolster a bolder response to the Ecological Education called for in the Laudato si’ Goals shown below?

Are we remembering and acting on these words from Laudato si' ?
“84… The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.” and: “85. The Canadian bishops rightly pointed out that no creature is excluded from this manifestation of God: “From panoramic vistas to the tiniest living form, nature is a constant source of wonder and awe. It is also a continuing revelation of the divine”.[55]”

Part 2: Canadian Federal Election

As I wrote in Understanding JPIC (2018 revision. 2021 revision pending!):
“3.2.83. As the Bishops of Ontario (1998) stated:

“Our first concern is to remind all Roman Catholics of their duty to become informed, to vote and to be involved politically, at the very least in the sense of knowing the issues and the policies of the parties with regard to them. … Pope Pius XI spoke of "political charity" as one of the highest forms of the virtue of charity. In more recent times, the Church has told us that "a merely individualistic morality" will not suffice, and that Christians must "give an example by their sense of responsibility and their service of the common good." "Christians who take an active part in present day socio-economic development and fight for justice and charity should be convinced that they can make a great contribution to the prosperity of mankind and to the peace of the world". (The Church in the Modern World, No. 30, 75 and 72).” (emphasis added)”

Politics and Faith in a Polarized World
A Challange for Catholics

By John Milloy
Published by Novalis,
1 Sept 2021, 114-pages.

Michael Swann wrote that John Milloy pleads “with Catholics to take politics seriously and regrets that Canadian Catholics who want to contribute to national debates aren’t getting a lot of help from their leaders right now. Canada’s bishops seem unable to publicly explain what they’re doing or why they’re doing it when it comes to the legacy of Indian residential schools, among other things, he said.” [I see some evidence that it might have started to change for the better since Milloy drafted his text.]
“There are some wonderful bishops out there and some incredible priests. But as a whole, I think they have to get their act together,” Milloy said. “Obviously in terms of reconciliation, but on a host of other issues.
He compares what comes out of the contemporary bishops’ conference with the bold statements of Pope Francis. “You read Fratelli Tutti. You read some of what Pope Francis is saying. Good grief, he knows his stuff. The world needs change. He’s addressing the big picture and we’re not doing that in Canada,” he said.

[I find Season of Creation and Laudato Si’ Action Platform are examples of the Canadian Bishops needing to step up their act to be more bold in the forefront to encourage the laity to take bold action especially in terms of political advocacy c/f Laudato si' n. 179. On the occasion of the third World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation in 2017, the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) published a resource entitled Living Out Laudato Si': A Commentary and Practical Resource for Canadian Catholics but it did not mention the Season of Creation although it was first endorsed by Pope Francis in 2015 and fully supported by him ever since. But now what is called for is a more vigorous promotion of Season of Creation as called for in Msgr Duffé’s letter quoted previously].

On 1 Sept, finally thank God, my Diocesan blog (Victoria, BC) mentioned the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation and the Season of Creation 2021. Better late than never! But more lead time is required for parishes to gear up! Dioceses that failed to even mention it at all, fall under what Laudato Si’, Part VI called “Weak Responses”! Unfortunately the Canadian Bishops are not alone in not doing enough to vigorously promote this issue. Here are two American voices with the same concern: “Philip, the former NASA official who now heads the University of Notre Dame's academic excellence program, said the science and increasing signs of climate change impacts make it clear that aggressive actions are needed now — "not in 10, 20, 30 years, now" — and that the Laudato Si' Action Platform can play an important role.

"Quite honestly, we do not see the church collectively acting nearly quickly nor strategically enough on this issue, as she does with other issues, and we just don't get it," said Anna Johnson, a unit director for U.S. mission formation and young adult empowerment for the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers.
And as another American, Thomas Reese, SJ wrote: “My only consolation is that Catholicism, through the pope, is on the right side of history for once. Sadly, too few of our bishops are following him and doing anything about the crisis. When was the last time you heard your bishop [and I would add: or your pastor] speak out on climate change? [There are some who have: "When it comes to the environment, climate change is one of the most serious moral challenges we face," Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City and Bishop David Malloy of Rockford, Illinois, chairs of the U.S. bishops' conference domestic and international justice committees, wrote in a statement for the day of prayer for creation. I mentioned the CCCB’s efforts earlier.]

As Pope Francis said [LS 217] concern for the environment can no longer be an optional or secondary aspect of Christianity. It must be central to who we are as Christians. We must care for God's creation; we must protect the Earth and all that lives on it. Otherwise, our children and grandchildren will experience the apocalypse.” (emphasis added)]

Back to Milloy. In his view, there’s nothing more Catholic than politics. “When you start to worry about the environment, when you start to worry about poverty, when you start to worry about women in crisis who are pregnant, when you start to worry about not just being pro-birth but being clearly pro-life, you start to create the type of society that we’re called to build. Then we’re answering that pro-life call,” he said. [Amen to that!]

The CCCB did publish a 2019 Federal Election Guide (but as of time of writing, 3 Sept, I have not seen one for 2021). But in 2019 it was so general; ultimately it is up to us as individuals to make our own decisions based on our understanding and priorities. Since no one party will meet all our requirements we have to “hold our nose” while voting!

I would like to remind us that, as Josianne Gauthier, CIDSE Secretary General (and a Canadian formerly with D&P/Caritas Canada) wrote , on politics as an act of love and courage: “Fratelli Tutti urges us all to make decisions for the “universal common good” by bringing us ever closer to our own responsibility in how we treat our “neighbour”. A healthy politics would transform our economy into one that “is an integral part of a political, social, cultural and popular programme”.”

Part 3: Bold action by young people raising their voices

Severn Cullis Suzuki was just 12 years old when she made an impassioned plea to avert ecological disaster at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992. The B.C. girl silenced the world. For a short while the world listened, but then little changed. Twenty-five years before Greta, we ignored Severn. Laudato si’ mi signore now we have Greta! Let’s hope she is right when she says: “We are unstoppable” because time is running out to make transition to a low-carbon future safe, just and inclusive.

In the face of social and environmental crises, the world would do well to follow the lead of its young people Pope Francis said in a video message to mark the start of the Season of Creation 2021. Here are three young women:

Left: Severn Cullis-Suzuki (12, Canadian) 1992 UN Rio de Janeiro
Middle: Autumn Peltier (13, Canadian) 2018 UN NYC
Right: Greta Thunberg (16, Swedish) 2019 UN NYC

Greta Thunberg marches alongside
Severn Cullis-Suzuki —
daughter to Canadian environmentalist icon
David Suzuki --
25 Oct 2019 in Vancouver, BC. Photo Kevin Hill
[Mike Howell, Vancouver Courier]

“Severn told the world everything the world needed to know 27 years ago, and the science told our world leaders everything they needed to know 27 years ago,” said Thunberg, who spoke recently [2019] to large crowds in Montreal and Edmonton, after travelling to North America in a sailboat and being transported from city to city in an electric car.

“If people would have listened back then, the world would be a completely different place than it is today. But the world ignored her, and world leaders continue to choose to look away from this crisis – even today.” Read more about Severn.

On 24 September 2021, Fridays For Future Canada will join thousands around the world for another Global Climate Strike. With a federal election underway and as extreme weather events abound, this is an historic opportunity to usher in the change that youth and marginalized communities have been calling for. We hope you’ll join us.

“Let us pray we all will make courageous choices, the choices necessary for a simple and environmentally sustainable lifestyle, taking inspiration from our young people who are resolutely committed to this.”
- Pope Francis

17 April 2017 The Pope encouraged Greta

Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Stephen Lewis and David Suzuki call for Emergency Leaders Debate [9 Sept?] on Climate because of urgent existential “Canadians need a chance to assess whether those who seek national leadership understand the severity of the crisis, and what their plan is to combat it.” A letter was signed 16 August by the four distinguished members of the Order of Canada.

N.B: When you vote remember:
Canada Bankrolling Oil and Gas by $13 Billion a year.
Now is the time for the Government of Canada to begin to shift that into sustainable energy!

I just learned this (!) and must share: Did you know that geothermal deep well water can provide heat for electricity and it contains lithium which is something we also need for batteries and is a greener way to access it than traditional mining it in rock. Alberta’s oil and gas well drillers could use their skills to drill for this water and keep jobs!

Before closing click on 2021 Season of Creation Prayer then sing along to the Love Song to the Earth

Peace & joy,
Andrew Conradi, ofs
3 Sept 2021

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August 2021 Blog

8/7/2021

5 Comments

August 2021 Franciscan Voice Canada
Blog by Andrew Conradi, ofs; JPIC & Laudato si’ Animator
who acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People, (of the place to smoke herring) also known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations,
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.

Part 1: LAUDATO SI’ MOVEMENT

Launched: 29 July 2021: Learn More

Pope Francis:
“God will give us a new name, which contains the meaning of our entire life.”
Canadian Cardinal Michael Czerny:
"This name is a prayer. When we name the movement now, every time we name it, we're saying a prayer."

The movement is now called the Laudato Si’ Movement. A change that has the support of Pope Francis.
As part of a two-year synodal process, the mission, values, and structures have also been changed and improved.

The Laudato Si’ Movement celebrates and embraces all initiatives born from the encyclical and all organizations working for ecological and climate justice.

Watch the new name announcement video

Cardinal Czerny in front of Timothy Schmalz’s Angels Unawares

Some takeaways: Laudato Si’ ultimately is much more than an encyclical; it represents the Franciscan worldview of praise to the Creator in “sublime communion” with all Creation (LS 89). That Franciscan attitude is the climax of what an ecological conversion looks like and serves as the guiding star of all our efforts. [As OFS Rule 18 puts it: “Moreover they should respect all creatures, animate and inanimate, which bear the imprint of the Most High, and they should strive to move from the temptation of exploiting creation to the Franciscan concept of universal kinship.”]

New mission statement: “To inspire and mobilize the Catholic community to care for our common home and achieve climate and ecological justice.” Grounded in our Catholic identity, we are committed to “a new and universal solidarity” (LS 14), cultivating “fraternity and social friendship” with all humanity (FT 2).

The movement brings together a wide range of Catholic (1) organizations and (2) grassroots members from around the world. These members walk together in synodality and communion with the universal Church on a journey of ecological conversion. Seeking unity in diversity, organizational and grassroots members come together to pray, collaborate and mobilize in response to the “cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

Guided by a spirit of subsidiarity, when the time and context are right, they co-create or engage … on a wide range of initiatives to bring Laudato Si’ to life.” [i.e. “animate”] We are called to be “Contempl-activists”, cultivating a contemplative “ecological spirituality” (LS 216) and engaging in prophetic activism.

In faith and confidence, we walk forward in communion with our wider Catholic family, all people of goodwill, and every creature on our planet singing as we go, praising our beloved Creator, so that “our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope” (LS 244).

PART 2: INDIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS
SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT
(IRSSA, 2005/6)
What price reconciliation?
How to overcome the legacy of grief that comes from injustice?
Warning: Part 2 may cause discomfort even shame!

I consulted many sources. The more I looked into this issue the more complicated and - at times - confusing, it became. Much has been written and some is unclear, incomplete, unbalanced, inaccurate, confusing and misleading. I have tried to be the opposite! Generally two useful sources are Toronto's website and Calgary’s website.

First: have remains of bodies been found? Let me quote Dr Sarah Beaulieu (anthropologist, University of the Fraser Valley) who did the research in Kamloops, BC. She said: “We can never say definitively that they are human remains until you excavate, which is why we need to pull back a little bit and say that they are probable burials.” She reduced the number from 215 to 200.

This is because the radar only reveals the location and shape of ground disturbance consistent with a child sized grave. I would add, strongly probable given the survivors oral evidence; and there are surely more nearby. To complicate things, in some places e.g Marieval, Sask, non-indigenous adults and children were buried in the same or contiguous cemeteries that have been barely maintained, if at all, and whose wooden crosses have disappeared or surface stone markers overgrown.

Second: the children at these schools mostly died from the same causes as non-Indigenous children at the time though at a much higher rate. Their deaths were not just a Catholic but a national crime and not murder, but rather exacerbated by neglect and the horrific conditions revealed by Dr Bryce.

Source: Sandra D Moore, Former Chief, Hiawatha First Nation (Ojibway), Ontario
via Marzio Apolloni (with thanks)

I have tried to summarise and simplify but I am neither an expert nor lawyer. Much as I love the goodness and good people of the Catholic Church I am ashamed of some aspects of the Canadian Church’s response to its 2005/6 agreements to compensate survivors of Indian Residential Schools established under the 1876 Indian Act. Separated from their families, sometimes forcefully, students suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, and systemic violations of basic human rights and cultural shaming amounting to cultural genocide in residential schools operated by Catholics, and other Christians. Nor did many get a proper education but were used to work on the land or in housekeeping.

However, let us remember, as Archbishop Bolen of Regina said: “There are many important questions about who was fundamentally responsible for residential schools and why were they allowed to function for so long. Stories have surfaced about efforts from 100 years ago to name and put a stop to the disastrous consequences of the residential school policy, drawing attention to voices that should have been heeded. In the society at large and in the Church there were voices that said this was wrong, this should stop or at the very least, we should stop being complicit in what is happening here. Those voices haunt us now." [Indeed! That last sentence is an understatement!]

Archbishop Bolen noted: "Chief Cadmus Delorme [a Cree and Saulteaux, currently Chief of the Cowessess First Nation on whose reserve the Marieval Indian Residential School operated from 1898 to 1997 in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan] has commented how Indigenous and Church people of today have inherited the present situation. I quote, 'Nobody today created residential schools. Nobody today created the Indian Act. Nobody today created the ’60's scoop. We all inherited this.' It’s helpful for us to hear that. But it is for us to rise to the occasion to be instruments of healing and reconciliation."

Archbishop Bolen added: "It doesn’t help when either the Church or the government deflects their proper responsibilities. With this in mind, we are working earnestly to support healing and reconciliation through this province-wide appeal." The appeal to which he referred is mentioned below.

In a tweet of 16 June, Bishop Scott McCaig, CC, Ordinary of the Canadian Armed Forces, succinctly summed up exactly where the Church went wrong, very wrong: “The Church should not have participated in government policy of residential schools. It contradicted our teaching on inculturation and supporting what is good, true and beautiful in a culture. It opposed subsidiarity and centrality of family. May we never sacrifice Gospel principles again.”

How much did Canadian Catholic parishioners who were asked to raise $25 M actually care about reconciliation and right relations with
First Nations, Inuit and Métis?
If money talks then sadly not much. But this is now changing.
[And the same can be said of the Government of Canada].

The bottom line for the Canadian Catholic Church: it must to do the right thing and pay the full amounts promised to residential school survivors in 2005 as part of a settlement. At one time, the Catholic Church was the only church refusing to pay its 30 per cent share of survivors' claims. It finally agreed but insisted on including an escape clause for the final $25M. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA, 2005) was long and complex, so two words inserted into a Catholic side deal got little attention back in 2006. But those two words - "best efforts" - are at the heart of what amounts to a multimillion-dollar renege or betrayal. The IRSSA stated that the Catholic groups that ran the residential schools − the "Catholic entities" − were required to pay a total of $79 million for abuses suffered by survivors.

Renowned Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz’s newest creation is called Residential School and crafts a classroom with a lone Indigenous girl sitting at one of 14 desks — representing Canada, each province and territory — resting her head with a feather in her hand.

Photo: Timothy Schmalz (Schmalz builds as others tear down, Quinton Amundson, Catholic Register, 15 July 2021)

With the bishops and many dioceses insisting on the independence of each diocese and order, 16 dioceses and 32 orders were left to fulfill three legal requirements of the 2006 settlement: (1) $29 million in cash payments primarily owed to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation; (2) $25 million in in-kind services over 10 years the Catholic groups would deliver themselves to Indigenous communities; and (3) $25 million to be raised in a major, national fundraising campaign.

Have these commitments been met?
In 2015, the Catholic Entities and the federal government disagreed on whether the first commitment of $29 million had been met. Arbitration in a Saskatchewan court ruled that final payment of $1.2 million was owed, so the Catholic Entities paid that money and the judge ruled that all their financial obligations had been met. N.B.: it was the Government of Canada, not the First Nations, Inuit or Métis which released the Catholic Church! Now that is colonialism! It was legal but was it just?

The second commitment required the Catholic Entities to provide $25 million of in-kind health, well-being and community services between 2007 and 2017. By 2014, the Catholic Entities had delivered nearly $30 million to community-based projects. Those services continued after 2014, even though the legal commitment had already been met. But as of 26 July 2021, a Church documentation claiming this is sitting inside a Regina courthouse, but officials are refusing to release it.

Mayo Moran, a former dean at the University of Toronto's law faculty, who served as independent compensation committee chair for the landmark Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2005, says all parties involved in the 2005 residential school settlement, including the courts, should do everything possible to be open and accountable to survivors. "We need to do everything possible to give survivors the information they deserve.... Do it. Do it quickly. Don't make it more painful for individuals that have already suffered so much."

It is the third legal requirement that was not met, falling $21M short.

With a board of Church and Indigenous leaders including Mary Simon, the recently appointed Governor General, and former Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine, the “best efforts” campaign was launched into the teeth of the 2008 stock market crash and the Great Recession.
While KCI [the corporation hired to fundraise] tried to sign on corporate Canada and large donors, most Canadians, including Catholics, did not know the campaign was going on and at that time were unaware of the history of the schools. When the campaign, in desperation, turned to a pew collection in 2013, only 14 dioceses (out of over 70) participated.

After seven years, and having spent $2 million (which would be standard if the campaign had indeed raised $25 million) with little to show in return, Moving Forward dismissed KCI and decided to hold a special national collection across the country. It was taken up in parishes on 8 Dec 2013, including in dioceses which never operated residential schools.

Again the timing was unfortunate: the envelopes hit the pews just a week after Typhoon Haiyan swept through the Philippines. The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace raised over $13 million for rebuilding projects in the Philippines. This was before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report was published online 24 Sept 2015.

Let me cite an example of fundraising and ask if it shows a lack of awareness, indifference or imbalance amounting to (forgive my bluntness) an appalling selfishness? While the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon (which itself never operated an Indian Residential School but signed on voluntarily) and its 80,000 members spent $28.5 million on a new second cathedral (they already had one), they raised just $34,650 for Indian Residential School survivors. The story was similar in other cities. Canada's 12 million Catholics donated less than $4 million of the promised $25 million — roughly 30 cents per person.

After several years, the Government of Canada told the Catholic Church to pay up. Instead, church officials hired one of Canada's top lawyers, Gordon J. Kuski, QC who charged his normal rates, and in a private court hearing, successfully argued that the country's Catholic churches had tried their best and had no more to give and instead offered $1.2M to settle. On 16 July 2015, after a secret hearing the previous month, Justice Neil Gabrielson sided with the Catholic Church, saying the federal lawyer wasn't clear enough in his opposition to the Church’s proposal and a "reasonable person" would conclude a deal had been struck.

Retired Saskatoon Catholic priest and Member of the Order of Canada, André Poilièvre, 85, spoke out against the church to the CBC, saying he's ashamed it used a legal "loophole" to escape its $25-million promise to residential school survivors. "We were complicit with the government in the design, the implementation and the management of these schools … As a Catholic church, we were responsible. We need a collective, corporate response. …It's scandalous, really shameful. It was a loophole. It might be legal, but it's not ethical."

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond is a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation north of Saskatoon, a former Saskatchewan provincial court judge and current Director of the University of British Columbia's Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre. She studied the case closely once the results were made public. She said the church betrayed survivors by using high-priced lawyers. She said: "They manipulated the legal system to their advantage. They found a legal back door. I know how that works out when it comes to issues for Indigenous people in Saskatchewan, and in Canada. …They [the church] should go back. They should raise the money, and then some. There is a spiritual and moral deficit here."

University of Calgary law professor Kathleen Mahoney, who helped craft the IRSSA while working for the Assembly of First Nations, also said she was disgusted. "They relied on these highly technical arguments. It may have worked, but it's not very honourable. It's not moral. It's not ethical," Mahoney said. She also said it's ludicrous for the Catholic churches to claim they couldn't find the money.

That is why I say shame on the Church.
But there is hope...

That is why I say shame on the Church. But there is hope: clerical, religious and lay awareness has grown due to the rediscovery and publicity over the unmarked gravesites and change is coming.

St Francis of Assisi eventually realised that the command “Go rebuild my house” did not refer to physical buildings but the spiritual building of the people of God. So what? Surely so that they would act justly and keep promises and not renege.

This is a story about the failure of Catholics and their leaders to respond to their role in the federal government’s scheme to erase Indigenous culture and assimilate Indigenous children into white society, said Grouard-McLennan Archbishop Gerard Pettipas. “This was not seen as an issue that was felt equally among the bishops,” he said. “There were those of us who were signatories to IRSSA and those who were not.”

Archbishop Pettipas wants to look ahead now that Catholics are fully aware of what was learned from the hearings and 2015 report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. “Over the last month, I would say there has been a much stronger engagement, even of faithful Catholics, faithful Catholics who are upset, very upset. … They expect us to do more.” Pettipas believes a more national and unified Catholic response is now necessary. “The reality is that we are independent corporations. That’s true,” he said. “Does that mean that it’s impossible for us to work together as a bishops’ conference?”

“Love thy neighbour” is a key Christian ethic. However, in view of the failure to pay what was originally promised by our senior Canadian Catholic officials, because of the “best efforts” escape clause many grassroots laity are saying we, i.e. dioceses and parishes supported by laity that had no part in operation of the schools, must step up and pay what the Catholic entities originally promised. Some said individuals could divert parish donations in all or in part to organisations that help indigenous people (or to the renewed diocesan appeals). I support that and am going to do just that.

A national lay effort to raise funds and awareness for reconciliation is rising up out of the grassroots of the Catholic Church in Canada. Catholics for Truth and Reconciliation is a group that began as a Facebook discussion forum following the recent publicity of unmarked graves, and quickly grew to over 2,000 subscribers. It launched an appeal to all Canadians to raise funds and embrace the Calls the Action set out in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. “It’s very important to do this now,” Jody Garneau , one of the group’s founders, told The Catholic Register. “There’s an immediacy.”

As to the Government of Canada, Tasha Kheiriddin in the National Post, 7 July 2021, wrote: “Federal Government spent nearly $100 million over the last three years fighting indigenous communities in court - more than Stephen Harper’s Conservative government over the same time span – despite the promise to reject this “adversarial and “profoundly damaging” approach.” On the other hand, in January 2020 the federal government announced $200 million in funding for “Legacy Projects” related to residential schools, and in June 2021 announced $50 million to fund the new Day Scholar Revitalization Society. As of December 31, 2020, more than $1.82 billion of targeted funds has been allocated to support 694 water and wastewater projects in 581 First Nations communities of which 393 are complete. In December 2020, the Government of Canada announced an additional $1.5 billion to help accelerate the work being done to end all long-term drinking water advisories.

The Catholic groundswell got the bishops’ attention. The Saskatchewan and British Columbia Bishops and Archdiocese of Toronto have announced that they will renew fundraising. These renewed efforts to do the right thing give me hope. Here are four with links to online donation info: Saskatchewan dscf.ca/catholic-trc-healing-response. Vancouver will hold an Archdiocesan-wide Second Collection on the weekend of September 11/12. Donations can be made online here: https://support.rcav.org/archdiocese/archbishops-priorities/donate-to-bc-bishops- appeal/.
Toronto online through community.archtoronto.org, by phoning 416-934-3411, or through any church in the archdiocese. Surely more dioceses will participate e.g. Calgary. You can check your own diocesan website as more come on board.

Laudato si, mi signore!
Peace & joy, Andrew Conradi, ofs

5 Comments

July 2021 Blog

7/7/2021

1 Comment

July 2021 Franciscan Voice Canada blog by Andrew Conradi, ofs; JPIC & Laudato si’ Animator who acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People, (of the place to smoke herring) also known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.

National Crime: Indian Residential Schools & unmarked graves
(cont’d from June 2021 blog)

Nicholas Flood Davin’s grave site, Beechwood National Cemetery, Ottawa, ON, Canada. He was Conservative MP for Assiniboia West from 1887 – 1900 and is considered one of the architects of the Canadian Indian Residential School system. In 1879 he wrote a Report known as The Davin Report, in which he advised the Government of Canada to institute residential schools for Indigenous children based on an American model and in which disease spread and many died and were buried in unmarked graves.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and the

Dialogue Centre at the University of of British Columbia in Vancouver, explained some of the difficulty in identifying the children and the cause of death. She said there is ample evidence of inadequate records. For example, some children were recorded with no first or last names, such as “Indian Girl No. 237.”

How ironic & deplorable that Davin has such a grave marker in sharp contrast to most First Nations children who died in the schools & lie either in unmarked graves or ones like this:

A grave marker denoting one of 72 graves at the Battleford Industrial School, NWT now Sask
[1883-1914] cemetery. The graves were excavated in 1974 by a team from the University of Saskatchewan.
PHOTO BY SASKG/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
(National Post)

It was the first residential school operated by the Government of Canada with the aim of aggressively assimilating Indigenous people into the society of the settlers. N.B. The name Battleford is derived from the nearby river of the same name which was known as the "Fighting River" because it once marked the boundary between the Cree and Blackfoot First Nations. Obviously they fought each other.

I am sure we have all heard of the 215 remains found in unmarked graves in Kamloops, BC and the 751 in Marieval, Sask (some of which may be of adults). How could this have happened?

One explanation: Government, police, church and news media collaborated;
Story by Story, Canada’s News Media Built Indigenous Oppression
How relentlessly racist framing helped ‘write’ the Indian Act — and persists today.
Read more...

Author Katłįà (Catherine) Lafferty wrote: “On July 6, 1885, Sir John A. Macdonald rose in Parliament to reaffirm the by then well-established colonial portrait of Indigenous peoples as a danger to society and spreaders of illness. “I have not hesitated to tell this House, again and again, that we could not always hope to maintain peace with the Indians; that the savage was still a savage, and that until he ceased to be savage, we were always in danger of a collision, in danger of war, in danger of an outbreak,” he said.

The quote is included in Bob Joseph’s book 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, an excellent primer on the cruel and racist legislation that continues to oppress First Nations.

If Joseph had wanted to make it 22 things, he could have added that the Indian Act was the result of words not just by politicians but also Canada’s press, each feeding the other in a vicious circle of denigrating stereotypes and justifications for genocidal policies. … The news media of the day, therefore, played an instrumental role in rallying the citizenry and providing politicians their talking points. … Shocking headlines portraying First Nations as savage threats regularly appeared in journals and missionary newspapers at the time. These also proved useful for creating, in 1877, the Dominion Police, also known as the North-West Mounted Police. They became the RCMP, who today claim they were formed to guard Parliament and protect First Nations peoples.

But scholars say the force was created mainly to enforce the Indian Act. …Candis Callison is a member of the Tahltan Nation and an associate professor at the University of British Columbia in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the School of Journalism, Writing and Media. An expert in the power and role of media, Callison notes that Canada’s settler society was complacent about the harms caused by the residential school system for nearly a century. “Why weren’t media of the day asking questions about the welfare and well-being of children?” she says. “Why weren’t media asking why the church was still in control of these schools well into the 20th century and towards the end of it? It is not that long ago that many of these incidents happened.” [I ask why was the Catholic Church not asking these same questions? What a pity they did they not follow St. Thomas More, 16th-century English martyr, who remained loyal to his conscience and religious principles, and famously stated at his execution, “I die the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first.”]

Perhaps this is the time to interrupt Lafferty and point to possible extremist US influence. You may have heard of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was written by L. Frank Baum, who from January 1890 til March 1891, published a weekly newspaper, The Saturday Pioneer, in Aberdeen, S.D. This was in the early 1890's during the Indian Wars. When Baum heard of the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee, he wrote editorials calling for killing each and every last Native American. Here is the editorial of 3 January 1891 about the massacre at Wounded Knee:
"The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.”

Now back to Lafferty. She continues: “Launched in 1830, the Indian Civilization program was based on three philosophical principles, states historian John F. Leslie in testimony given to Parliament in 2002. These were: Indian protection, based on the Royal Proclamation; improvement of Indian living conditions; and Indian assimilation into the dominant society.” [Guess which principle predominated and which ones fell by the wayside leading to cultural genocide?]

Did Canadians not know, care or understand?
They could have known because what Lafferty wrote is only true to a certain extent. If Canadians were not indifferent and wanted to know they could have known because the press did publicise Dr Bryce’s

report: “Importantly, it was not only the Canadian government but the broader population that learned of Bryce’s report; for example, on Nov. 15, 1907, The Evening Citizen (an earlier edition of the The Ottawa Citizen) ran a front-page story with the headline “Schools Aid White Plague — Startling Death Rolls Revealed Among Indians — Absolute Inattention to the Bare Necessities of Health.”6 (Travis Hay, Cindy Blackstock and Michael Kirlew, CMAJ, 2 March 2020)

After Canada passed the Indian Act in 1876, Nicholas Davin, MP was tasked with finding a means to educate the country’s Indigenous peoples. The Indian Act authorized the Canadian government to regulate and administer the affairs of Indigenous peoples.

Davin visited the Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian Industrial School in 1879 and was impressed with U.S. Army Lt. Richard Pratt, the school’s founder, and his use of boarding school education as a means to force assimilation onto Native people with a mission to “kill the Indian” to “save the Man.” This became the model for Canadian Indian Residential Schools and to “kill the Indian in the child.” Today we recognise this forced assimilation as imperialism, colonialism and cultural genocide.

U.S. boarding schools were often woefully underfunded. Conditions at the schools —poor food, clothing, cold damp housing as well as close sleeping quarters — contributed to the spread of disease and sometimes death. According to researchers in the USA, many schools failed to keep accurate records of student deaths. Parents of those who died were often notified after the child’s burial, if they were notified at all; few could afford travel expenses to pick up their children’s remains. Sounds familiar? It spread to Canada.

Before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (TRC), only thirty percent of Canadians were conscious of the country’s residential schools, which were modeled upon the U.S. boarding school system. After the TRC released its findings, seventy percent of Canadians were informed about this traumatic history. Following the TRC, seven in ten Canadians agreed that the term “cultural genocide” should be used to describe the residential schools policy.

We cannot pretend we do not know and hope it will go away. What should we do? As Indigenous people mourned after the Kamloops and Marieval discoveries (and there will be more to come) they also called on Canadians not to turn away from the grim reminder of a system that forcibly took children from their families.

"We call upon Canada, and all of those who call yourselves Canadians, to witness and recognize the truth of our collective history," said Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, in a statement.

Such recognition is exactly why I write this.
To refuse to become painfully aware is to wilfully turn a blind eye
to injustice and silence is complicity.

Getting back to how could this have happened?
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was formed to examine the legacy of the schools, has identified at least 4,100 children who died of disease or by accident in these schools. It's estimated that the actual number of deaths could be more than 6,000.

There was never an official policy on how to handle the dead from Indian Residential Schools, but because the Department of Indian Affairs refused to ship home the bodies of children for cost reasons, it follows that most were buried on or near school grounds. This was confirmed by the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released in 2015. “Many, if not most, of the several thousand children who died in residential schools are likely to be buried in unmarked and untended graves,” it wrote. “Subjected to institutionalized child neglect in life, they have been dishonoured in death.”

The high mortality of students was not unexpected and just accepted as a price to be paid. Katherine A. Morton, an instructor and researcher in anti-colonial and Indigenous studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland said that in addition to unmarked graves at the schools, many sites also purposely included cemeteries. "If you look at the blueprints for residential schools when they were first built, many blueprints indicated that there were plans for graveyards to be put in … You don’t build a cemetery into a high school for white kids." she told BuzzFeed News.

As published by Maclean’s Magazine, 8 June 2021, Father Paul Bringleson of St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church in Flin Flon, Man., delivered a homily 6 June 2021 about the Catholic Church’s role in residential schools in Canada and said: “One of the expressions that was found to be discovered in the early days of the residential school inquiries that took place over 20 years ago, was a recurrent phrase in both church and government documents that the goal was to take the Indian out of the child.
Charles Adler [Canadian writer and broadcaster] commented that it seems that the priests took the Christ out of Christian. And he’s right. He’s absolutely right.”

USA situation
A bill to establish the Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy in the United States was introduced by Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) in 2020 but died. 22 June 2021: Secretary of the Interior Debra Haaland announced a Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of US federal boarding school policies. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that.

More opinions on apologies
Pope Francis wrote:
Laudato si’(19): “Let us review, however cursorily, those questions which are troubling us today and which we can no longer sweep under the carpet. Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.” (emphasis added).

Fratelli Tutti (244 & 249) is particularly vocal on justice for the poor and marginalized. “When conflicts are not resolved but kept hidden or buried in the past, silence can lead to complicity in grave misdeeds and sins,” and, “Nowadays, it is easy to be tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened long ago and we should look to the future. For God’s sake, no! We can never move forward without remembering the past; we do not progress without an honest and unclouded memory.”

Cathy Majtenyi, Catholic Register: “It’s time the Canadian Church takes responsibility for the role it played in this cultural and spiritual destruction, the trauma of which is still being felt today. This is far more than a “sad affair” and an “upsetting discovery” as Pope Francis described in his June 6 address. A papal mea culpa — as called for in the Truth and Reconciliation’s Calls to Action — is a powerful way to do this.”

Father Paul Bringleson: “The statement that came from the Conference of Catholic Bishops was one of the weakest gutless statements I think I’ve ever read. We need to call that out for what it is. It boils down to thoughts and prayers. It’s not enough.”

Cindy Wooden: “Already in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI met with representatives of Canada’s First Nations, expressed his sorrow for the suffering of Indigenous children over decades in the church-run residential schools. But he did so privately. The Vatican press office later put out a statement and the representatives spoke to the press, but the apology was not public.”

Archbishop Donald Bolen of Regina, Saskatchewan: The pope, he told Catholic News Service June 10, wants the bishops “to be very honest about the past,” including “our sins and our terrible mistakes.” Bolen said that the Indigenous people he has spoken with have differing opinions about inviting Pope Francis to Canada, even though in the Canadian media there is a “clarion call.” But, he said, for many members of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities, it is essential.

First, of all, he said, “most Indigenous people, especially Indigenous Catholics, see the pope as the chief,” … So, he said, many Indigenous Canadians are looking to the pope “to be connected, to take some ownership and to speak on behalf of the church.”
Asking the pope to make the apology formally on Canadian soil is not an arbitrary request, the archbishop said. “The land is so central to Indigenous spirituality, to meet people on their land is vital in terms of a relationship.” An initial step should take place before the end of the year. [It will take place in December].

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops announced June 10 that a delegation of “Elders/Knowledge Keepers, residential school survivors and youth from across the country” representing First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities is preparing to travel to the Vatican. The trip originally was scheduled for last year but was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pope, Bolen said, will be able to listen to their stories and hear, in person, what they need from him and the church.

Archbishop Luigi Bonazzi, who was then-nuncio to Canada, said in 2016 that Pope Francis was considering a visit to Canada to make the apology. Then nothing more was said. Papal visits require an invitation both from the government and from the national bishops’ conference. [The Pope always has requests to visit many countries and cannot visit them all; but surely Canada is a special case]. (emphasis added).

Monuments: destroy or keep?
Tk’emlúps te Secwėpemc (Kamloops) First Nation is going to keep its school building. Other First Nations have destroyed their school buildings as too painful a reminder. Statues and monuments that have long honoured racist figures are being destroyed, removed to storage, spray-painted — or beheaded etc. in many parts of the world. Personally as an ex-teacher I think we should face up to our past and “retain & explain.”

Bear Horne’s design for Orange Shirt Day 2017 features a bear to give us strength to follow the right path, an eagle to help us have a vision of a bright future, a hummingbird to keep our mind, body and spirit healthy, and a flower to feed the connection of all these elements. (Photo of T-shirt: Left: Front; right: back)
Orange Shirt Day T-shirts are available year-round by contacting Eddy Charlie or Kristin Spray at victoriaorangeshirtday@gmail.com

Laudato Si Action Platform
We need a bold embrace of the Laudato Si Action Platform! Many think it has been lacking!
Without it, we are irrelevant to the greatest existential threat to human civilisation. Why has the Canadian Catholic response from our Bishops to Laudato Si’ not been commensurate with the urgency and gravity of the climate crisis? How can we prompt them to more deeply integrate Laudato Si’
and its climate change teaching into the Canadian Church? Cardinal Hollerich told us to write to our bishops. Here’s my letter to my bishop (feel free to write something similar to your bishop):

26 June 2021
Dear Bishop Gordon,
1. Laudato si’ Action Platform.
2. Papal Apology for Catholic involvement in Indian Residential Schools.

I write to you as my bishop at the suggestion of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg and President of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union.

We need a bold embrace of the Laudato Si Action Platform! It was outlined over a year ago. So far some think it has been lacking in Canada and Victoria Diocese and parishes. Without it, we are irrelevant to the greatest existential threat to human civilisation and yet care for creation is deeply rooted in the Bible and Catholic Social Teaching.

I wonder why the Canadian Catholic response from our Bishops to Laudato Si’ has not been commensurate with the urgency and gravity of the climate crisis? I write to prompt you to more deeply integrate Laudato Si’ and its climate change teaching into the Diocesan entities.

I have heard nothing from the Diocese of Victoria about the Laudato si’ Action Platform promoted by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development or Laudato Si’ Week 2021 (actually 10 days: 16-26 May). The week was sponsored by the Dicastery, and featured a number of webinars and closed the Laudato Si’ Year with a press conference regarding the Laudato Si’ Action Platform. In one of the webinars Cardinal Hollerich said: “that bishops often are busy and attending to many issues at the same time, but they pay attention to topics that people keep mentioning: So write to your bishop. Tell them about it. … Likening his fellow bishops to grandfathers who are likely to listen to their grandchildren, he suggested that young Catholics write to them with their concerns about climate change. "So please, young people," he said, "tell your grandfather bishop about disinvestment." ” [He was speaking about fossil fuels].

I beg you to quickly get moving on these issues. Why not wholeheartedly support them through the Season of Creation starting in September?

On my second point, I appreciate your apology of 3 June 2021. I further expect the CCCB to act and to do the right thing by inviting the Pope to Canada without further delay, to deliver the apology requested in Truth & Reconciliation Commission Call to Action 58 and for which many church voices have also called. The responsible individual entities’ apologies are not enough. Archbishop Bolen of Regina has written that the First Nations consider the Pope to be the Chief and: “The land is so central to Indigenous spirituality, to meet people on their land is vital in terms of a relationship.” Thus the apology, so crucial to reconciliation, would best be made in Canada. I only hope that when the Elders/Knowledge Keepers, residential school survivors and youth from across the country representing First Nations, Inuit and Métis visit the Holy Father hopefully later this year, they will tell him that. After all he has said in support of listening to Indigenous wisdom in Laudato si’; the Amazon Synod and Fratelli Tutti, I suspect he will listen.

Your Grace, it is well known that you care deeply for the First Nations and creation (which I also observed in working with you) and so I am hopeful of a favourable response. As always, you are in my prayers.

Peace & joy, Andrew Conradi, ofs
JPIC & Laudato si’ Animator

OFS CANADA LETTER
Since I sent my letter I learned that the National Council of OFS Canada also sent a letter to the CCCB concerning the Indian Residential Schools but did not publicise it until 4 July when I read it on p2 of the National Bulletin July 2021 which was disseminated to members via the official channels. I support every word. However, my first reaction is we need further and stronger action and I am considering a further letter to my bishop and pastor from me as an individual concerning the Indian Residential Schools Survivors Agreement of 2005. Money talks!...see next month

One last point: another reason to listen to Indigenous wisdom:
This concept of land: so Indigenous, also Catholic, also Franciscan!
From Listening to Indigenous Voices: “Syilx Okanagan author and artist Jeannette Armstrong, [PhD, Associate Professor, UBC Okanagan] offers some insight into how her people think of the concept of land.

“In our language, the word for our bodies contains the word land,” Armstrong writes. “Thus, in my mind, every time I say that word and I refer to myself, I realize that I am from the land.” This mindset requires “a way of interacting with each other that is respectful to the land and respectful to each other … We live on the land and we use the land and, in so doing, we impact the land: we can destroy it, or we can love the land and it can love us back.” [Andrew adds: important to realise this connection in giving a Land Acknowledgement]

“Many people deplore the lack of references to Indigenous Peoples in the history taught in Canadian schools. And still others are looking for ways to become true allies,” wrote Nicole O’Bomsawin, Abenaki activist and anthropologist, in the foreword to Listening to Indigenous Voices, (by the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice launched 28 April 2021, Novalis) a study guide created for small group or classroom study which includes 11 structured sessions with information to read, video links, discussion questions, and project ideas. As the title implies, it takes its cues from personal testimonies and cultural stories of First Nations people.

She calls this new resource “an indispensable tool” for people who want to “make a difference today in building bridges across ignorance and racism.” She released a resource on what work can be done to make amends aiming to help guide some of those conversations. Listening to Indigenous Voices was released by religious publisher Novalis with endorsements from TRC commissioner Marie Wilson and Archbishop Donald Bolen of Regina. For more information visit www.ltiv.ca. Read more...

The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address acts as a traditional thanksgiving by acknowledging the Haudenosaunee people (Six Nations), the earth, the animals etc, etc, and the Creator. Through this process of thanksgiving, the Haudenosaunee worldview is expressed and defined, presenting interconnectedness and interdependence with nature, the earth and human beings.

Does the Thanksgiving Address remind you of the Canticle of the Creatures? (4:18) Text alone

Also see the excellent Thanksgiving Address Video – with scrolling text, music (9 mins 22 sec)

Peace & joy, Andrew, ofs

1 Comment

June 7, 2021

6/6/2021

2 Comments

Andrew Conradi, ofs acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People, (of the place to smoke herring) also known as the Songhees and
Esquimalt First Nations, for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.
June 2021 Blog

In 2009 the House of Commons
declared June to be National Indigenous History Month.
It is a time for all Canadians to learn & reflect the history of
First Nations, Inuit and Metis people.

The Day was announced in 1996 by then Governor General Romeo LeBlanc

Shock & horror but no surprise: A National Crime

When faced with 215 of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’s children’s remains being located in unmarked graves, we are saddened but should not be shocked. Dr Peter Henderson Bryce became the first Chief Medical Officer of the Department of the Interior of the Government of Canada in 1904. This was 20 years after Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald made First Nations children official wards of the state with an 1884 amendment to the Indian Act that mandated residential and day school attendance as compulsory for Indian children who had attained the age of seven years. Bryce was therefore responsible for the health of Indigenous children in the Indian schools.

He toured residential schools and exposed them as disease incubators and superspreaders. He revealed the horror of these schools and demonstrated that they killed children. The Canadian government ignored his reports. Duncan Campbell Scott became Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs in 1913 and cut Dr Bryce’s funding for research and interfered with his presentations at academic conferences. Refusing to be silenced, Bryce finally resigned and had published a pamphlet entitled The Story of a National Crime which detailed his struggles as a medical officer hamstrung by Duncan Campbell Scott. Thus we cannot say Canadians did not know; most condoned, ignored or were just indifferent. For more on this see Dr. Peter Bryce (1853–1932): whistleblower on residential schools, an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (2 March 2020) by Travis Hay, Cindy Blackstock and Michael Kirlew. Blackstock, a McGill professor, is a relentless campaigner for indigenous children and is a Gitxsan ('People of the River Mist').

In our reflection we have to ask ourselves why the approximately three dozen Catholic orders and 17 dioceses involved in residential schools in Canada remained indifferent. Why did they not refuse to be parties to this cruel forced assimilation, physical and cultural genocide but instead cooperated with evil [A National Crime indeed] in a serious case of “clericalism and racism?”

Apologies
Those who allege that the “Canadian Catholic Church” has never apologized simply do not understand how the Catholic Church is structured. Many apologies have been made. The Catholic community in Canada has a decentralized structure. The Catholic Church as a whole in Canada was not associated with the Residential Schools, nor was the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops or its forerunners. Each Diocesan Bishop is autonomous in his diocese and, although a member of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, is not accountable to it. A religious order is responsible to its own Minister General or Superior who is responsible to the Vatican.

Approximately 17 out of 70 Catholic dioceses in Canada were associated with the former Indian Residential Schools, in addition to about three dozen Catholic religious orders. Each diocese and religious community is corporately and legally responsible for its own actions. All the relevant constituent parts - individual dioceses, religious orders and the associations of bishops - have apologised. Indeed, many did so in their submissions to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 2008 - 2015, organized by the parties of The Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. This was approved by all parties to the Agreement and is the largest class action settlement in Canadian history.

Prime Minister Harper apologised in 2008.

All of the dioceses that had residential schools and all or most of the religious orders involved apologized years ago, and those expressions have been renewed in recent days (June 2021). A 1991 apology by Canadian bishops and leaders of religious orders that participated in the schools was quoted in 1995 to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, more than a decade before the TRC was established.

The Kamloops residential school was within the Archdiocese of Vancouver’s boundaries when it was established which is why Archbishop J Michael Miller, CSB of Vancouver wrote this on 2 June 2021: “I am writing to express my deep apology and profound condolences to the families and communities that have been devastated by this horrific news. … I take this opportunity to reflect upon the apology I gave publicly before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2013, [which was repeated in 2015] words to which I remain committed and accountable: “I wish to apologize sincerely and profoundly to the survivors and their families, as well as to all those subsequently affected, for the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of those Catholics who perpetrated mistreatment of any kind in these residential schools.” The Church was unquestionably wrong in implementing a government colonialist policy which resulted in devastation for children, families and communities.”

While the Catholic Church as a whole has not apologized for its role in residential schools in Canada, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate who ran the Kamloops School did offer an apology in 1991. In part it read: “We apologize for the part we played in the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious imperialism that was part of the mentality with which the peoples of Europe first met the aboriginal peoples and which consistently has lurked behind the way the Native peoples of Canada have been treated by civil governments and by the churches. We were, naively, part of this mentality and were, in fact, often a key player in its implementation. We recognize that this mentality has, from the beginning, and ever since, continually threatened the cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions of the Native peoples.”

Cardinal Thomas Collins, Archbishop of Toronto (3 June 2021) said in a statement released on Thursday : “We must also recognize the betrayal of trust by many Catholic leaders who were responsible for operating residential schools, abandoning their obligation to care for young and innocent children.”

Collins added that while many of the Catholics orders responsible for the schools have apologized publicly, including the Oblates: “These actions do not erase our history; they acknowledge our past, force us to face the consequences of our behaviour and compel us to ensure that our sins are not repeated.” He also noted that meeting with Canada’s Indigenous leaders, including National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine, in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI “expressed his sorrow at the anguish” caused by some members of the Church. Fontaine later told media it was a “very significant statement” that he hoped would “close the book” on the issue of apologies. The TRC (No 58) called on the Pope to apologize for the “Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools. We call for that apology to be similar to the 2010 apology issued to Irish victims of abuse and to occur within one year of the issuing of this Report and to be delivered by the Pope in Canada.”

For his part, Fontaine in 2018, without “diminishing” anything in the 2009 process, aligned himself with the TRC’s recommendation. The TRC’s recommendation implies that a formal papal apology in Rome would be inadequate; it has to be made in Canada. Pope Francis was invited to Canada by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2017 to make an apology. In 2018, the Pope told Canada’s bishops he could not “personally respond” to the TRC’s request for an apology, but encouraged the bishops in furthering their reconciliation efforts.

Why could Pope Francis not personally respond? Pope St John Paul II made a total of 98 apologies; Pope Francis would have a huge impact on truth and reconciliation in Canada if he would actually apologise on behalf of the whole Catholic church. Fr Ken Thorson, Provincial Superior of OMI Lacombe Canada: "I can only imagine how much more powerful the apology would be coming from his holiness, Pope Francis, who the Indigenous peoples have a great love for. So yes, it would be my hope that at some point in the future this apology can happen," Thorson told CBC News Network's Power & Politics.

Pope Francis has already apologized for the church's role in colonialism in the Americas, but he has mostly chosen to make such apologies while visiting countries. No papal visit to Canada is scheduled. Visiting Bolivia in 2015, Francis apologized: “I say this to you with regret: Many grave sins were committed against the native people of America in the name of God … I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offense of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”

Catholic Church protocol stipulates that the Pope will not visit a country unless he first receives an invitation from the Conference of Catholic Bishops of that country, and the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops had not invited the Pope to do so.

It is time for Catholics to confront stubborn church leaders, ask that they act with decency and courage and to do the right thing: invite the Pope to Canada without further delay, to deliver the apology requested in TRC Call to Action 58?

The Oblates later paid out money in lawsuits and contributed to the $3 billion in compensation given to 28,000 claimants who were residential school survivors. But there still remains the question of the archival records: not all have yet been turned over. They are not all in one place and need to be searched out and digitised which will take time. Father Ken Thorson, OMI, said the order had looked at making the records available in 2015 but the effort stalled. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the government and schools did not record the child's name in about one-third of the deaths at residential schools. For nearly 50 per cent, they did not record the cause of death.

The acting head of the Royal British Columbia Museum’s archives, Genevieve Weber, said the museum has about 250 boxes of materials, a third of which relate to residential schools run by the Oblates. She says the records range from financial statements and letters to diaries of daily life, known as a Codex Historicus.

She said the Museum will work closely with Indigenous groups as it processes and documents records from the Oblates which the Museum started to receive and process in 2019, and has been reaching out to Indigenous communities mentioned in them to discuss how they would like to proceed in terms of disclosure. She says the records should be available to researchers by 2022.

But the federal government has itself been accused of resisting efforts to publish records related to the residential school system and the atrocities that took place within the schools. As recently as 2020, Ottawa won an Ontario Superior Court case that blocked the creation of statistical reports on residential school abuse claims and the direct transfer of other records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

The Supreme Court of Canada also ruled in 2017 that thousands of records documenting abuse at residential schools should be destroyed. Canada remains in possession of records related to residential schools, though the federal government has signed on to legal agreements that prevent some of the records from being released without the Church's consent.

“Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong”

“Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong”. I am reminded of what Robert McNamara, former US Defense Secretary wrote about Vietnam in his In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995) in which he describes the political climate of the era, mistaken assumptions and misjudgments that combined to create the Vietnam debacle.

“It is hard to face one's mistakes. We acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong.”

This surely also applies to the Government of Canada and the Catholic entities involved in the Indian residential schools. Let us reflect on that and learn.

GOOD NEWS/ BAD NEWS

GOOD NEWS:
Spending on new oil and gas projects needs to end immediately to avert climate crisis, International Energy Agency Executive Director Fatih Birol warns.

Only an 'unprecedented transformation' of the world's energy system can achieve net zero emissions by 2050. The world has a choice — stop developing new oil, gas and coal fields today or face a dangerous rise in global temperatures. That’s the bold assessment from the International Energy Agency, the organization that has spent four decades working to secure oil supplies for industrialized nations. In its new road map for achieving net-zero global carbon emissions by 2050, the IEA laid out in stark terms what the planet must do to avoid harmful climate change — and just how far that is from our current reality. Perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.

Perhaps the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.

Sales of new cars with internal combustion engines would have to end by 2035, with the role of electric vehicles expanding from 5% of the global fleet today to 60% by 2030, the IEA said. Oil demand should plunge to 24 million barrels a day in 2050 and never again exceed the level of almost 100 million barrels seen two years ago.

But it’s a path that few are following. Government pledges to cut carbon emissions are insufficient to hit “net zero” in the next three decades and would result in an increase of 2.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the IEA said. “This gap between rhetoric and action needs to close if we are to have a fighting chance of reaching net zero by 2050,” the agency said. Only an “unprecedented transformation” of the world’s energy system can achieve the 1.5 degrees Celsius target.

“No new oil and natural gas fields are needed in our pathway,” the IEA said. If the world were to follow that trajectory, oil prices would dwindle to just US$25 a barrel by mid-century, from almost US$70 now.
[In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said, “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” As Pope Francis wrote in 2015: “We know that technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay.” (Laudato Si’, 165.)]
No new pipelines. No new liquefied-natural-gas projects on the US Gulf Coast. No “gas led recovery” in Australia. No TMX pipeline from Canada’s tar sands. None of it.

BAD NEWS:
The Brutal Legal Odyssey of Jessica Ernst Comes to an End
After 14 years of battling Alberta regulators and the fracking industry over a water well contaminated with methane and chemicals, Jessica Ernst says she feels incalculable grief and anger. After her own well water was contaminated with explosive volumes of methane and other chemicals, she eventually decided to sue Encana, the Alberta government and the oil and gas regulator, then known as the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board, for gross negligence.

[But] a scandal-plagued regulator argued legal statute granted it immunity from lawsuits and that it owed “no duty of care” to landowners. At the end of her lawsuit, her business is dead, and Ernst is now 64 with no prospect of employment in her profession.

She reflected on her ordeal with a sober rage. “The oil and gas industry can break the law. Their regulator can violate the law and punish those harmed. And it is all supported by a legal industry that enables the abuse while punishing harmed citizens, dragging them through the courts and taking their money. It’s a dirty system, and that’s my summation.”

Laudato Si’ Week 2021 (actually 10 days: 16-26 May) sponsored by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, featured a number of webinars and closed the Laudato Si’ year with a press conference to present the “Platform of Laudato Si' Initiatives”, in a “soft” launch 25 May 2021. Let me share a few of the points made that stood out for me from the webinars and press conference.

The first webinar was entitled “Critical Opportunities in 2021 to create change: call for an integral path.” Fr Zampini, who is an Adjunct Secretary of the Dicastery and an inspiring speaker said: “Crises are opportunities to create something new…. We must be fertile soil for the seeds to grow fruit.” Laudato Si’s influence does not diminish with time but rather grows; although it has not yet trickled down to the diocesan or parish level yet in many parts of the world [and I would have to say that is what I see with few exceptions in Canada. March for Life is heavily promoted and yet lives lost to climate change and pollution hardly at all].

The second webinar was on “Laudato Si Dialogue on Education”. Here speakers outlined models and examples of integrating Laudato Si’ values into existing and new Catholic formation/ education mainly at the university levels. I found that the phrases “sacramentality of creation”; “Christian Catholic cosmovision”; mention of “see, judge, act” and the idea of a tapestry being woven by Yanomami (Amazonian) women as a metaphor for “interconnectedness” resonated strongly with me.

Laudato Si' Action Platform
Catholic climate leaders have frequently pointed out the massive potential for the church to be a major force in addressing global warming by mobilizing the world's 1.2 billion Catholics, roughly 15% of the global population, and leveraging its enormous property footprint.

Pope Francis' Laudato si' positioned the church to be a prominent voice on climate change. But despite that call, there's still a feeling that Catholics have the potential to do more. With the Laudato Si' Action Platform, the Vatican invites the church to do just that - and at a critical stage for the future of the planet. For Secular Franciscans I have to ask how well is JPIC and Laudato si’ incorporated into candidate and ongoing formation especially in light of this upcoming Laudato Si’ Action Platform?

A more complete formal launch is planned at the conclusion of the annual Season of Creation, on 4 Oct 2021, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Until then, church institutions, e.g. dioceses and parishes, can register to join the platform on https://laudatosiactionplatform.org/.

In this connection let me add an opinion from a LS Week webinar on fossil fuel divestment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KsYhbJzZiA. Starting at the 37 minute mark Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, Archbishop of Luxembourg and President of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union, both of which have divested from fossil fuels, said the urgency of climate change requires the church and all people to take action to stem global warming now. Asked how Catholics might approach their dioceses to ask them to reconsider fossil fuel investments, Cardinal Hollerich laid out the next steps in clear terms saying that bishops often are busy and attending to many issues at the same time, but they pay attention to topics that people keep mentioning: “So write to your bishop. Tell them about it.”

Likening his fellow bishops to grandfathers who are likely to listen to their grandchildren, he suggested that young Catholics write to them with their concerns about climate change. "So please, young people," he said, "tell your grandfather bishop about disinvestment."

I would add maybe parents could encourage their children to do this and ask their bishop what the diocese is doing about the LS Action Platform! Ask parish pastors the same question! And as a Canadian Secular Franciscan I ask the Canadian National Fraternity’s Formation Commission Team to add impetus to implementing Laudato si’ as called for by the Laudato si’ Action Platform and help build a grassroots movement. Franciscan Voice Canada would be happy to help.

Peace & joy, Andrew, ofs

2 Comments

May 6, 2021

5/4/2021

2 Comments

Andrew Conradi, ofs acknowledges and thanks the Lkwungen People,
(of the place to smoke herring) also known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations,
for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands.
May 2021 Blog

Promises need to become Real Action now!

Laudato Si’ Week 16-24 May 2021
will be the crowning event of the
Special Laudato Si’ Anniversary Year, & a celebration of the great progress the whole Church has made on its journey to ecological conversion.

For more info https://laudatosiweek.org/events/

He said in LS 13: “for we know that things can change”

Can faith leaders shift public opinion toward climate action? by Brian H. Smith, Professor emeritus of religion at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. He was a member of the Society of Jesus for 21 years.

Time for bold action from leaders

How many Catholics, for example, know of the important work of the Global Catholic Climate Movement ?

This is the time for religious leaders to act boldly, since saving the environment is a pro-life issue.

The World Health Organization (WHO) projects that climate change will cause approximately 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050. Elderly people, children and those living in coastal cities are expected to be particularly vulnerable.

Catholic bishops regularly speak about abortion and the sanctity of traditional marriage. … If they began to support policies to protect the environment and called pollution an "ecological sin" (as did the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon in 2019), those in the pews might be mobilized to channel their environmental awareness and concerns into action.

Members of the hierarchy are sometimes very specific when they point out what they believe is wrong in public policies affecting the unborn. There is no serious reason why they could not make saving the environment a major moral imperative for Catholics, as well.

It is one of the most critical pro-life challenges of our era, and time is running out to prevent massive deaths in the coming decades.

If one is "pro-life" for the unborn, one cannot remain "pro-choice" regarding the environment. Without bold action now, millions of born humans will die in the next 20 years because of inaction in face of this planetary crisis

AND NOW TURNING TO MINING:

What AngloAmerican’s logo should say…

TAKE ACTION: Send a message

See Kairos Canada: Faithful Action for Justice

Barrick Gold Mines Focus of Conflict Globally
“Barrick’s global environmental and human rights track record at these and other mines remains dismal,” says Catherine Coumans of MiningWatch Canada. … “Barrick must stop turning a blind eye on the demands and rights of local communities,” says Diana Martin of MiningWatch Canada. “For many of these communities, Barrick’s mining practices mean the destruction of their livelihoods and ecosystems. As they so often tell us, their water is their gold.” See Mining Watch

Fossil fuel $$ in the B.C. Budget
The B.C. NDP released its new budget 20 April 2021, and it contained over $1 billion for oil and gas companies in the form of tax breaks, incentives, and direct funding. Let’s be clear: This budget was a huge missed opportunity to diversify B.C.’s economy and invest in creating new, sustainable jobs in renewables (or really – anything but fossil fuels). Instead, the government decided to continue its policy of giving fossil fuel CEOs massive handouts from the public purse. If you haven’t already, help increase the pressure on the government by signing the petition to stop fossil fuel subsidies. Just click on the preceding sentence link!

Pope Francis: no time to wait on climate change

In twin Earth Day messages, Pope Francis warned a gathering of world leaders and the global community at large that "we are at the edge" with climate change, and the time to take action is now.

Waste and plastic

Pope Francis, 2015, Laudato si’, n 22. “ … problems are closely linked to a throwaway culture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish. … our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. A serious consideration of this issue would be one way of counteracting the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet, but it must be said that only limited progress has been made in this regard.”

DID YOU KNOW?

According to the Environmental Justice Network: “Trash incineration is the most expensive and polluting way to manage waste or to make energy. It’s dirtier than coal and is more polluting than direct landfilling of trash. For every 100 tons burned, over 70 tons becomes air pollution and nearly 30 tons end up as toxic ash that is dumped in the county’s landfill, making it more dangerous than if waste were placed there directly.” (FAN Newsletter: Love is of God, 3 May 2021)

In Canada approximately 97% of the waste requiring final disposal is sent to landfills and 3% is incinerated. Incineration can reduce the volume of MSW by 90%. Today, incinerators use advanced air pollution controls and can include technologies that remove 99% of the dioxins and furans emitted from incineration. [Can include? How well and how much do they actually remove?]

Training and mobilization for campaigns against incinerators and landfills and for recycling initiatives comprise the majority of The Zero Waste International Alliance (ZWIA) actions.

ZWIA launched a new program at its last board meeting, The Albatross Alliance, to be headed by world-renowned captain of the oceanographic research vessel Alguita, Charles Moore, author of Plastic Ocean. “Zero Waste is the only strategy that can save these legendary seabirds and the oceans where they feed and breed.”
(ZWIA) continues to react to the world wide challenges posed by mismanagement of materials known as solid waste. A Zero Waste future is not only possible, but also inevitable in a crowded world such as ours.
Zero Waste Europe welcomes the [Laudato si’] encyclical of Pope Francis and is pleased to see that there is a growing consensus on the need to transform our wasteful societies into zero waste ones. As Paul Connett once said, “God recycles, the devil burns”.

BUT HOW CAN WE DO IT? YES;
WE DO HAVE TO CHANGE!

RECOMMENDED: HERE ARE SOME WAYS:
ZERO WASTE #BREAKFREEFROMPLASTICS

How much plastic do we ingest?
We Consume a Spoonful of Plastic a Week

You’ve heard about all the microscopic plastic in our water supply. We’re breathing microplastic, eating it and drinking plastic-infused water every day. It is everywhere: in mothers’ milk and in the Arctic.

To date, humans have produced 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic. About 8 million tons of it washes into the oceans every year, where it doesn’t biodegrade—because its large polymer molecules were designed to last forever, and they do. Instead, bigger plastic objects break down into smaller, microscopic fragments, littering marine ecosystems from deep ocean sediments to polar icecaps. And as they float down the rivers and into the ocean these miniature fragments come back to us with the water we consume.

Plastic does not biodegrade. Instead, it breaks down into smaller pieces, and ultimately ends up everywhere, including in the food chain. Pieces that are less than five millimeters in length, around the size of a sesame seed, are called “microplastics.”

People could be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card of plastic a week, a recent study by WWF International concluded, mainly in drinking water but also via sources like shellfish, which tend to be eaten whole so the plastic in their digestive systems is also consumed

Every week 5 grams of plastic. That’s about the same weight as a plastic bottle cap and enough shredded plastic to fill a porcelain soup spoon.

“We have been using plastic for decades but we still don’t really understand the impact of micro- and nano-sized plastic particles on our health,” said Thava Palanisami of Australia’s University of Newcastle, who worked on the WWF study. “All we know is that we are ingesting it and that it has the potential to cause toxicity. That is definitely a cause for concern.”
Are we responsible? What should we do?

Bottled water sellers beware: This student is coming for you

Mireta Strandberg-Salmon campaigned to end bottled water sales in her B.C. high school and university.
...READ MORE

Photo submitted by Mireta Strandberg-Salmon

She was asked: Do you have anything to say to older readers?
Listen to youth voices. Step in when you are needed and then step back. Create space for young people to lead, and keep an open mind when young people challenge the status quo. ...READ MORE

Merci, les évêques/ thank you, bishops!
Quebec’s Catholic bishops don’t just want a recovery, they want change.

The Quebec Assembly of Catholic Bishops’ annual May Day message [St Joseph the Worker] calls for a basic income, higher minimum wage, an economy less dependent on fossil fuels, tax reform that redistributes wealth away from the wealthy and policies that recognize how women have been disadvantaged in our economy.

“Women and young people have been especially hard hit,” the bishops write in “Towards a Just Recovery: Paying Attention to the Lives of Workers.” Read more...

Peace & joy, Andrew, ofs,
6 May 2021

2 Comments

April 09th, 2021

4/9/2021

0 Comments

April's 2021 Blog

 Did you fast during Lent?

“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” From Gospel to Life: Isaiah 58:6

Non sola scriptura sed magisterium: Pope Francis, Laudato si’, 217:
“Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience.”

As Pope Francis has written: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.” (Laudato si’, 139). This is clearly exemplified by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who reflected on the health and humanitarian consequences of climate change in a humanitarian policy brief published as part of The Lancet Countdown: Tracking Progress on Health and Climate Change 2020.

“Studies from 2015 to 2020 have shown that climate change had a role to play in 76 floods, droughts, storms and temperature anomalies” said two of the MSF co-authors. Specialists warn how human-caused disruptions to the environment will exacerbate existing medical and humanitarian needs, particularly in climate hot spots.

Re Climate change and covid-19 - consider this:
“But we must not suppose that all the trials and hardships of life are punishments. Many of these are tonics for the soul, and remedies for its deficiencies. The physician who requires his patient to swallow bitter medicine or to undertake painful exercise, is not punishing the patient, but assisting him to health. The physician is not inflicting penalty, but conferring benefit. So it is with many of the pains and distresses which we endure in life; these are medicines prescribed by God for our eternal welfare.”
So said St Thomas Aquinas, OP READ MORE...

Belated Happy 85th Birthday to
David Takayoshi Suzuki, CC, OBC, FRSC
and many thanks!

In June 2018, Pope Francis hosted oil and gas executives on “Energy Transition and Care for our Common Home.” He said: “Yet even more worrying is the continued search for new fossil fuel reserves, whereas the Paris Agreement clearly urged keeping most fossil fuels underground… Civilization requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilization!”

[PM Justin Trudeau; Conservative leader Erin O’Toole & Premier Jason Kenney are Catholic. And yet …? Then there is the mind boggler from the recent Conservative Party resolution – see below]

Fast from the silence...

We must
speak up!

See video 37 sec

“The businesses, national or international, which harm the Amazon… should be called for what they are: injustice and crime.” Pope Francis, 2020, Querida Amazonia

OFS Canada National Fraternity and Franciscan Voice Canada recently co-signed a letter by The Special Commission on Integral Ecology and Mining for the Brazilian Bishops' Conference (CNBB), the international Catholic network Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM) and the German Catholic Church Bank: Bank für Kirche und Caritas (BKC) to Brazilian government officials with clear demands to protect the Amazon and the indigenous people living there. By supporting this letter as a co-signatory, we give more weight to these demands and joined the first Catholic engagement in this dimension.

I asked the three OFS First Order Franciscan Spiritual Assistants if their Provinces had co-signed. Thank you Br Ben Ripley, OFM for passing on the suggestion to his Provincial; from the list of co-signers I see the Franciscans of Canada co-signed. I know all Spiritual Assistants are busy but I did not hear back from the Conventual and Capuchin SA’s if they asked their Provincial before the deadline of 25 March; but I wonder: if not, why not?

Daniel DiLeo of Creighton University told an online audience that the U.S. Catholic church is failing to respond to the climate emergency. He said: “"The U.S. Catholic response has not been anywhere near what is commensurate with the science and the magnitude of what [Pope] Francis describes as the climate emergency. So we've done some things, but it's not anywhere near commensurate with what's required."

This prompted a mea culpa from Archbishop Michael Jackels of Dubuque, Iowa, in his response to the lecture. Can we say the same for the Canadian Catholic Church and the Franciscan Family as a whole, with only a few exceptions, in Canada? Are some more mea culpa’s due? As the Bishop of Rome wrote (Laudato si’, 161): “The effects of the present imbalance can only be reduced by our decisive action, here and now. We need to reflect on our accountability before those who will have to endure the dire consequences.”

I continue to ask: can you imagine the positive effect on youth “who will have to endure the dire consequences” if they saw a Canadian Bishop or a religious Provincial at a Fridays for Future demo?
Cardinal Hollerich invites us to celebrate the #SeasonOfCreation

Pope meets Greta Thunberg 17 April 2019 and supports the Fridays for Future climate strike.
https://youtu.be/cj-ErzvbLfk

Montreal high school students march 27 Sept 2019 as part of a worldwide day of protest against climate change. (Louise Gravel/Radio-Canada)

INFINITE GROWTH
FINITE PLANET

The financial sector is at the heart of an economic model that is killing us and irreparably damaging the planet we inhabit. Failing to act now will have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. Yet big banks have funded the fossil fuel industry to the tune of 2.7 trillion dollars since 2016. What drives this suicidal behaviour is our economic system. Addicted to infinite growth and ever-increasing profit extraction, this system requires more burning of fossil fuels, more resource extraction, more deforestation and more consumption.

We need an economic system that prioritises human welfare and flourishing, not infinite growth on a finite planet.

DEMANDS
We demand governments, banks, and other political, economic and financial institutions:
Tell the truth about our global economic system which creates staggering inequity, distorts priorities and causes harm. Financial institutions must fully disclose the social, climate and ecological impacts of funding, so it is clear who is paying the true cost.

Act now to stop financing death, destruction and social collapse. Start repairing damage, and make the necessary investments to prepare for the climate, ecological and health crises.
Champion Citizens’ Assemblies at all key levels, including global, with legally-binding mandates to design a fair and just economy in service to all people and life on earth.

Programs in Earth Literacies are about igniting our connection with the living Earth and the profound connection of all life that emerges on it. But did you know that our work promoting Earth Literacies goes beyond our workshops? Read more...

The world needs climate justice, and we need it now. Our politicians, corporations, and leaders have been promising a greener, better future for years, but the world continues to spiral into climate chaos, jeopardizing the present of many, and the future of all. As the end of the fossil fuel era approaches, it is necessary that we move forward from this pivotal point in history through a Just Transition that will ensure the security of our futures. This "Just Transition", as called for by the international trade union movement, must be at the heart of solutions as we work towards a greener economy.

The youth movement is here, more than ever, and we are demanding that Canadian government stop abandoning the promises they have made. Because there is still hope for a better future, once we act.

We as grassroots groups from across Turtle Island [the name used by some First Nations for North America], unite in calling on the pillars of the fossil fuel industry, the government, banks, and insurance companies to #ActOnYourPromises in order to build a safe and healthy planet for all.
Go here to find out more about telling our banks to divest from fossil fuels.

Laudato si’, 13:

“for we know that things can change”

This is what the major Canadian banks have invested
and need to change.....

If you are a Secular Franciscan ask your Franciscan First Order Spiritual Assistant to ask their local Minister and Provincial what bank they deal with and join this campaign. Refer to Caritas in Veritate & Laudato si’! Pope Benedict XVI in his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate wrote that...

the economy - and by extension finance too –“needs ethics in order to function correctly— not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which is people-centred” (CiV, n 45) and...

Pope Francis calls in Laudato si’ for a renewed sense of responsibility on the part of all for the common good and for our brothers and sisters worldwide, and this in a spirit of fraternity. (nn 25, 189 & 190)

Individual actions, necessary though they are, are not enough alone and need to be accompanied by government and corporate action. We can Raise Our Voices to make that happen:
The Royal Bank of Canada is the fifth largest fossil fuel funder in the world and the biggest one in Canada. Since 2016, when the Paris climate agreement was signed, RBC has poured over $200 billion into dangerous fossil fuel projects that threaten the very existence of our planet.

Sign now: Tell RBC to stop funding climate destruction and respect Indigenous rights.

Here is a way we can celebrate Earth Day 22 April

The For the Love of Creation faith-in-action campaign is calling on the Hon Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, to commit to:

reduce Canada's national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 60 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and
invest in a just transition to a fair, inclusive, green economy that creates good secure jobs, and promotes the well-being of everyone in Canada.

Send your letter to Minister Wilkinson now!
It will be automatically copied to the Prime Minister as well as to your local Member of Parliament.
Go to the letter here.

Check out these GCCM-Canada Eco-Invest webinars.
Also see Matching Catholic values with investments

A mind boggler or what?
Conservative party members vote down resolution to officially recognize climate change (20 Mar 2021)(Global News)

Though the party’s policy declaration already contains a lengthy section on that subject, 54 per cent of delegates voted against expanding it to include the sentence “we recognize that climate change is real. The Conservative Party is willing to act.”
Ahead of the convention, the anti-abortion group Campaign Life Coalition had circulated a “voters guide” to the resolutions and had urged its membership to vote down the one on the environment, saying “global warning alarmism” was being used to justify population control and abortion.

[I can only ask should they not also care about pollution which according to an article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet (19 October 2017) reports that pollution overall accounts for an estimated 9 million premature deaths each year? And how many lives is climate change causing?]

However, according to CBC, 22 Mar 2021, despite Conservatives voting against climate motion, O'Toole says he'll have a climate plan before election and hints at targeting big emitters rather than households.

   About time! But actually everybody - all of us - will have to pay our fair share.
What is our fair share?

Belarus, Hong Kong, Syria, Honduras plus many others
& now Myanmar

Archbishop Emeritus of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, OFM Cap wrote a book (2021) entitled:
Things Worth Dying For: Thoughts on a Life Worth Living

Things Worth Dying For? Good question! Consider this:
Sister Ann Rosa Nu Tawng, of the Sisters of St. Francis Xavier congregation in Myitkyina in Myanmar is speaking out after photos spread around the world of her kneeling in front of security officers in a desperate bid to shield anti-coup protesters from violence, 28 Feb 2021. The 45-year-old told the UCA News that she had prepared herself to “give my life for the Church, for the people and for the nation.”

Notice the three finger sign pictured below. The Hunger Games salute became commonplace early after the May 2014 military coup d’état in Thailand. Days after then-General Prayut Chan-o-cha assumed power, protesters began flashing the three-finger salute in defiance. Many early on saw the salute as emblematic of the French Revolution, a gesture of liberty, equality and fraternity. Others viewed it as meaning freedom, election, democracy. It has since been used in Hong Kong and now Myanmar.
Could it also mean justice, peace and care of creation?

Naypyidaw, Myanmar 18 Feb STR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES| https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-12/
https://www.ucanews.com/news/a-brave-nun-makes-a-stand-in-myanmar/91607

28 February 2021

8 March 2021 Pic: Myitkyina News Journal

Sister Ann Rosa Nu Tawng's resolve to protect peaceful protesters 28 Feb 2021 drew global praise. Sister Ann Roza put herself in danger again just over a week later on 8 March 2021 as she tried to stop police using violence against protesters in Myanmar. Sister Ann Roza pleaded with police not to harm protesters. See Skynews and Aleteia

UCANews reported that hundreds of Catholic laypeople joined by priests and nuns marched in Mandalay, praying the rosary out loud and calling for a peaceful solution to the crisis. Let us pray for them! See Vatican and Catholic Register

By 8 April Al Jazeera reported over 600 protesters killed by the military. In a video message to an online prayer service March 14, Yangon Cardinal Charles Bo said the Feb. 1 military coup and the ensuing crackdown plunged Myanmar into "yet another chapter of darkness, bloodshed and repression." A "decade of reform and opening" has been replaced by a return to "the nightmare of military repression, brutality, violence and dictatorship."

Ucanews.com reported Cardinal Bo praised "the amazing courage, commitment and creativity of our people, demonstrating throughout the country in their thousands for many days."

"They have shown their determination not to allow their hard-won democracy and freedoms, their hopes of peace, to be stolen from them. It was a beautiful sight to see and a great inspiration. The sense of unity and solidarity in diversity -- with people of different ethnicities and religions coming together for the same cause -- was remarkable. But that was met with bullets, beatings, bloodshed and grief. So many have been killed or wounded in our streets, and so many thousands have been arrested and disappeared."

Catholic priests joining Myanmar 's protests against the military coup, demanding the restoration of their elected government and leaders. Learn more

Did you wonder about the story of the woman and young girl
pictured in this Share Love Share Lent poster?

They are María Felícita López (31) and her daughter Hilda (8). María opposed hydroelectric project Los Encinos on Río Chinacla in La Paz, Honduras. Maria is the Coordinator of the Independent Indigenous Lenca Movement of La Paz, Honduras, (MILPAH) that defends mountains, forests and rivers and was born in response to the irregular concessions of rivers and territories to mining companies and hydroelectric projects in their lands. Maria and family have been harassed, insulted and their lives threatened because she defended her people against the building of a dam without community consent which is a breach of International Labour Convention 169. Instead, Global Witness claims that 600 people were bussed in from the neighbouring country of El Salvador to sign consent forms with the promise of employment and were then promptly bussed home again. Worse still, three indigenous activists have been killed and others have been victims of threats, intimidation and smear campaigns.
María’s home was raided by police and army claiming to search for weapons and drugs. Her husband fled to El Salvador after she says he was wrongly accused of murder.

Please support D&P/ Caritas Canada!

Christ is risen! Peace, all good & joy!

For Divine Mercy Sunday:
Micah 6:8
He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness (mercy), and to walk humbly with your God?

Rest in Peace: Swiss Catholic theologian who dared to ask difficult questions: Hans Küng (1928-2021)

“There was a bottom-up movement in Latin America to transform people’s lives,” says journalist Christopher Lamb [Rome correspondent of The Tablet], “and Pope Francis comes from that tradition. He’s not a liberal. He’s not a conservative.
He’s a radical.” [PBS, 2020, Inside the Vatican]

Radical just means going to the root of the problem.
Radical comes from Latin radix meaning root.
I too have been accused of being a radical, as if so being were bad,
and am guilty as charged!
I am happy to be in such good company!

Pax et bonum!
Peace & joy!

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Advocates + Responsibility: Leaders or Followers: all good!

3/6/2021

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I acknowledge and thank the Lkwungen People, (of the place to smoke herring) also known as the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations, for allowing me to live, pray, work, and play on their lands [on the southern coast of Vancouver Island, BC].

FROM GOSPEL TO LIFE:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against principalities, against powers,
against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places”
[Ephesians 6:12]

Here’s an example: (John Ivison, Two plus two adds up to five, National Post, 4 March 2021): “It is a bitter sign of the times that China has co-opted countries round the world to support its malignant policies. Two years ago, 22 countries, including Canada, issued a joint letter at the United Nations Human Rights Council condemning China’s policy in Xinjiang. Four days later, 37 countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Russia, issued a second letter, backing China’s behaviour and expressing their opposition to the politicization of human rights issues. Similarly, when the Human Rights Council took a vote on China’s crackdown in Hong Kong last July, 53 countries supported Beijing and only 27 criticized the new national security law. Again, support came from autocracies that are deeply indebted to China, as part of its Belt and Road infrastructure plan.”

ECCLESIA SEMPER REFORMANDA
[A CHURCH ALWAYS BEING REFORMED]
(St Augustine of Hippo)
Example of two strugglers “against spiritual wickedness in high places”

Photo credits: Left: Ismael Moreno Coto, SJ and Berta Cáceres, 2013 by Fr Melo Coto and ISN. Right: See below Jesuit article on Padre Melo

The following is a message from Fr Ismael Moreno Coto SJ (shown in photos above) regarding the brutal murder on 3 March 2016 of Berta Cáceres, an internationally renowned Honduran indigenous and environmental leader. Popularly known as Padre Melo, Fr. Moreno Coto is a Jesuit priest and human rights activist in his native Honduras. He directs Radio Progreso and ERIC (Equipo de Reflexion, Investigacion y Comunicacion).

I love how they work SJ into the logos!

From Global Catholic Climate Movement: Today [3 March] we remember Berta Cáceres, a Honduran eco-martyr who was killed by gunmen in 2016 after uniting the Indigenous Lenca people and
successfully pressuring the world’s largest dam builder to withdraw from the Agua Zarca Dam project in Honduras. Berta was a Lenca woman who co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and dedicated her life to protecting her community and community members.

A Honduran court ruled in 2018 that executives of the Honduran energy company involved in the dam project ordered her killing.

Here is an account of her murder: (Guardian)
Five years after the Honduran indigenous leader Berta Cáceres was shot dead by hired hitmen, the trial of the US-trained former military officer accused of masterminding the assassination has been scheduled for next month [April 2021]. …
“Our struggle for justice was never about the hitmen. It’s always been about wanting to prosecute and jail the decision-makers – those who ordered and paid for her murder. After five years, things have not advanced substantially due to a lack of political will,” said Bertita Zúñiga, one of Cáceres’s daughters.
“Having to confront this unwillingness in the justice system has been as painful for us as losing our mother.” Read more

Reflect: How can we speak up
for our most vulnerable sisters and brothers?

After an enormous outcry inside and outside Honduras,
7 men were finally brought to trial and jailed for their involvement
in the contract killing of Berta.
It was an important half-step forward in a country
of massive corruption and injustice.
Yet five years later, the people who masterminded the killing have yet to face justice, despite evidence and the findings of respected independent experts.
Berta’s family and her organization COPINH have appealed for us to raise our voices with them to demand justice for everyone behind the killing.
Messages from Canada carry weight in Honduras.
Here’s one way we can exercise parrhesia
(bold speech - which we have been told many times to do).
Send a message to Sofia Cerrato Rodriguez,
(Ambassador of Honduras to Canada). Here is the link

Radio Progreso & ERIC
are D&P (Caritas Canada’s) Partners and featured in this
ShareLent 2021 presentation which starts with a great song.
(Video also mentions Berta Cáceres) (1 hr total)

TWO THOUGHTS ON
THE CHURCH’S FUTURE;
FROM HONDURAS & QUÉBEC

From Honduras, Padre Melo:
“We are part of a church, of an institution, which is often more sinner than saint. But we ourselves are also sinners. What right do I have to so directly disavow a church with vertical institutionality that is so often incapable of listening to the cry of the poor, to adhere to such active norms and sexual morality, if we ourselves often fail to lead an austere life, dignified and devoted to others? That’s for starters.”

My team and I are convinced that if the church doesn’t change, it’s only going to become increasingly more isolated. Indeed, we need an ecclesiastical overhaul. Why? Because the church we have now hails from a time that no longer exists. And there is resistance to change. By seeking to stay in that time, the church is moving away from our reality and ultimately losing credibility, while also losing the capacity to provide a service to all of society. Thus, the church’s salvation—and to make the Gospels credible—lies in opening itself to a changing world. I don’t mean to say they have to accept everything we’re seeing now in society, but they do have to enter the dialogue. The Church has to open up and converse, debate about different things, because we live in an ever more pluralistic world, an increasingly diverse world. Religion is increasingly becoming just one sphere of this world, and not an entirety. Only by entering the debate can openness be achieved, listening to diverse ideas (the ‘other’) is how we will be able to modernise our mission of evangelisation. The biggest mistake the church is making is shutting itself off, sticking to concepts that completely come up against everyone else’s thinking.

Thus, the church has to enter the debate and listen to the many minority groups, such as for example those representing sexual diversity, women, Indigenous Peoples, and youth in its diverse forms. Because when you listen, you are then open to receiving the good news that is within these various groups, and not just attack them or say “this is bad”. No, I believe that to be a grave error. Only by listening, opening oneself to others, heeding the call, the cry of these various groups, is how the church can prepare itself to give answers in a creative and novel evangelising mission.”
[Sounds like the bishop I love: the Bishop of Rome! And my OFS Fraternity’s Spiritual Assistant! Some clerics get it and some not yet. Cardinal Lacroix seems to get it.]

Catholics in Quebec are leaving the church in droves.
Can reinventing parish life save it?
Excerpts from: Dean Dettloff , February 25, 2021 America Magazine

Cardinal Lacroix called on the church in Quebec not to struggle to hold on to what it has left but to see itself as a mission church moving outward:
“We must reorient our pastoral teams toward a more intensely missionary activity, turned toward the people and groups that we join too little.”

“Cardinal Lacroix’s decision is fully in tune with what the Quebec bishops have called the missionary turnabout, following Francis’s ‘Joy of the Gospel’.”
[We need to:] “ … kickstart the real church, the one that is not made of concrete, brick and mortar, but of flesh, blood and faith.” Still, 64 percent of people in Quebec identify as Catholic, according to the polling firm Angus Reid, even if weekly Mass attendance is no longer the norm.

Out of such challenges may emerge new expressions of authentic Catholicism in the province. “It means less parochial churches, priests and Sunday Masses, and more smaller meeting rooms where laypersons would animate the liturgy of the Word and be a sign of God’s love for humanity by their personal and collective [action] for the common good.”

It is an opportunity “to become the ‘field hospital church’ that Francis so often speaks about.” … “rediscovering the prophetic heritage of Catholic social activists involved in labor, feminist, ecological and decolonial struggles. The church would be wise to tap into that vein, with the hopes and dreams of Quebec’s youth.”
Mr. Barriault agrees. “A prophetic church like [the one sought by Pope Francis], highlighting social justice and solidarity with the destitute and the persecuted, has the potential of closing the chasm between the church and the modern, secular culture of Quebec.”

Black Lives Matter
When we consider BLM in Canada we should bear in mind the history of slavery in Canada and the connection between it and modern-day racism. Note that in New France religious orders were the biggest slave holders and two-thirds were Indigenous and mostly young girls rather than Africans; is there slavery in Canada today? Figures range from 800 to as much as 15,000. See Jean Bellefeuille, RIP 8 Dec 2017 and these two links Slavery of Indigenous People and Black Enslavement.

See past postings on the Trafficking & Slavery page on this website.
Note the link to the CFR Info Guide on the state of slavery in the world. It is a very pictorial document including video clips. It is touching to watch; we have much to learn, judge and act upon.

Happy St Joseph’s Day 19 March in this year of St Joseph; Patron of workers and Canada.

Peace & joy,
Andrew Conradi, ofs ,
JPIC & Laudato si’ Animator

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Laudato Si’ and Lent 2021

2/23/2021

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Papal Encyclical Laudato si’ (2015) on cry of the earth and cry of the poor:
An updated Canadian video

Kevin Moynihan produced an excellent video overview that I promoted in 2015 as an introduction to Laudato si’. “Laudato Si' - A Canadian Response” (35 minutes)

He has now produced an excellent update (Feb 2021 – 40 mins) in response to the Vatican’s Journeying Towards Care for Our Common Home: five years after Laudato Si (2020).

It features David Suzuki and the Rev. Dr. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam, SDB, coordinator of the “Ecology and Creation” sector at the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development; whose most recent book is The Ten Green Commandments of Laudato Si’ (Liturgical Press, 2018). Also Leonardo Boff, Professor Emeritus of the Franciscan Theological Institute in Brasil; Maude Barlow & Greta Thunberg to name just a few of the well known JPIC advocates/presenters.

Suzuki mentions that Pope Francis has broadened the view of human and environmental ecology by stressing that everything is connected. Kureethendam reminds us that “humans” are derived from “humus” (soil) and that should reminds us to be humble and care for the earth. He also reminds us that it was a Franciscan (Leonardo Boff) whose book Ecologia: grita da terra, grita dos pobres (1995, Ed. Ática, São Paulo; and in English 1997, Ecology: cry of the earth, cry of the poor, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY.) tied the two cries together regarding Amazonia. N.B. This phrase was adopted by the Québec Bishops in 2001 and repeated by the Social Affairs Commission, Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops: “The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor are one” in 2003.

The Laudato Si' + 5 video also reminds us of the Catholic See, Judge, Act method. Maude Barlow is featured on water; Catherine Abreu said that in 2016, the oil and gas extraction sector accounted for $29.5 billion or 10 percent of Alberta’s nominal GDP so, it should not be too difficult to transition to sustainable energy.
See more here:
- https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/fueling-canadas-economy-how-canadas-oil-and-gas-industry-compares-to-other-major-sectors/
- https://www.canadianenergycentre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/CEC-FS-18-Jobs-and-GDP-FINAL.pdf

Sister Margo Ritchie, CSJ tells us how on the 2019 World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, leaders of Canada’s 64 Congregations of Catholic Sisters called on the country’s politicians to respond to the climate emergency declared by Parliament by taking concrete steps to avert it and described what they themselves were doing. Learn more.
One of the things they have done is join the Blue Communities which recognise water as a common good and oppose privatisation of this vital resource. See more. Other interesting things were Halifax’s plan. Another thing mentioned was a Just Recovery. See more about that here.

Good Ideas to observe Lent 2021:
From Caritas Canada (D&P)
Here is Share Lent 2021 - Webinar 1 - Development and Peace's mission and Catholic Social Teaching (1 hr 10 mins) [I found it excellent!]:

The first SHARE LOVE, SHARE LENT campaign webinar featured the Most Rev. Pierre Goudreault, Bishop of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pocatière; Fr. John Patrick Ngoyi, director of the Justice, Development and Peace Commission (JDPC) of Ijebu-Ode, one of our long-time partners in Nigeria; and Gabrielle Dupuis, a youth member of Development and Peace and anglophone diocesan council chair for Ottawa-Cornwall. Through the sharing of personal insights and experiences, they explored the deep links between Development and Peace's mission and work; Catholic Social Teaching principles; and the ideas and ideals of Pope Francis, as expressed in his recent encyclicals. The webinar was moderated by Janelle Delorme, our animator for Manitoba and Thunder Bay. For more SHARE LOVE, SHARE LENT events and activities, visit D&P Lent Calendar.

And from GCCM:
Would you like to know how the Pope Francis’ Encyclicals, #LaudatoSi and #FratelliTutti, are connected? See this video (56 mins) with Fr. Augusto Zampini, Adjunct Secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Lorna Gold, Vice-Chair GCCM Board, or for a summary go to Franciscan Voice Canada/Andrew's Blog.

Ways of the Cross
Excellent to combine prayer with See, Judge, Act: GCCM links to two:
1. Ecological Stations of the Cross 19 Feb 2021 by GCCM Africa: [I loved it!]
This is quite long (1 hr 10 mins) and has a few technical problems occasionally with sound and smooth flow but bear with them it is worth it. Br Ben Ayodi, OFM Cap and GCCM Africa are the leaders. The pictures make it worthwhile and the background reflections to each station link cries of the earth and cries of the poor with Laudato Si’.

They are going to do one each Friday of Lent. The next one will be on Fri 26 Feb at 12PM EST (9 AM PST). See here. It will be produced by GCCM’s LaudatoSi’ Animators from Latin America. If the time is not good for you it will be recorded and you can see it on youtube at your own convenience.

2. And under GCCM’S Laudato Si' Lent you will find they link to Caritas Canada (D&P)’s 2016 Solidarity Way of the Cross: Create a Climate of Change (no pictures, text only; so about 25 mins?) which you can also access directly here.

3. A virtual Way of the Cross from the Holy Land. The virtual Via Crucis will come to an end on Holy Tuesday to make way for the celebrations of the Easter Triduum and Easter from the Places of the Redemption. The appointment is therefore from the start of Lent, every Tuesday and Friday on the social media of the Custody of the Holy Land (Facebook, Instagram and Twitter). Also available here.

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Homeless Jesus - Jesuits.ca

Andrew Conradi, ofs

What makes me tick is Catholic Social Teaching, now encapsulated in Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti. My view is that while the OFS Rule & Constitutions call us to courageous action in JPIC it seems to me our infrastructure, while saying the right things, is not always acting with the required urgency and forcefulness. It seems at times to be more self-sustaining and self-perpetuating and about the status quo. This risks being seen as irrelevant in the eyes of some, especially youth.

In encouraging us to be aware and act with urgency and forcefulness I can be seen to be a bit of a joyful nuisance. Forgive me for not apologising. “Jesus himself warns us that the path he proposes goes against the flow, even making us challenge society by the way we live and, as a result, becoming a nuisance.”
(Pope Francis, 2018, Gaudete et exultate – Rejoice & be glad, n 90)
After all, Our Seraphic Father Francis was a rebel (check out the 2018 book Francesco il ribelle by Enzo Fortunato, OFM Conv)

(Poster from Canadian Jesuits)

BTW I am a Brit immigrant, ex Canadian high school geography and history teacher and Cold War armoured reconnaissance soldier. Other accomplishments include OFM JPIC Animators course 2014, Pontifical University Antonianum, Rome; JPIC Animator; Provocateur (Challenger); Enfant Terrible and sometimes definitely a deliberate NUISANCE! I am open to correction, chastisement, and/or teaching by email!
apconradi@telus.net

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Advocates + Responsibility: Leaders or Followers: all good!

Laudato Si’ and Lent 2021

Andrew Conradi, ofs

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