On a dusky fall evening, I take a walk down a familiar neighborhood street. Ahead of me, a small deer looks my way at the same moment I spot him. Freezing, I realize he’s being followed by seven companions. They dash across the street and disappear into a backyard.
Sharon Lavigne has been called a modern-day Moses. But the perhaps unlikely environmental prophet — a 71-year-old retired special education teacher — doesn’t want to lead her neighbors out of St. James Parish, Louisiana. She said she just wants area industries — which lie in the 85-mile corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans ruefully nicknamed “Cancer Alley” — to stop poisoning them. So in 2018, Lavigne — a lifelong resident of St. James Parish and a member of St. James Church, a predominantly Black Catholic parish in the Diocese of Baton Rouge with a 250-year history — founded a faith-based environmental advocacy group, Rise St. James.
Here is a collection of notable quotes from Pope Benedict XVI from homilies, documents, messages and speeches from 2005 to 2013, the years he served as pope.
“The Letter: A Message for our Earth” will be broadcast on PBS on Wednesday, Dec. 21.
The ecumenical Season of Creation observed by Christians worldwide from Sept. 1-Oct. 4, ending on the feast of St. Francis.
Among the many environmental issues Pope Francis is concerned about, the one that “has shocked me the most,” he once said, is the way resources are increasingly being consumed faster than they can be regenerated.
In the spotlight: U2 singer Bono, Buffalo mass shooting, military pilgrimage to Lourdes
A 2021 report from the Springtide Research Institute said 74% of Catholics age 13 to 25 identified environmental causes as something that they are concerned about or that they care about.
