Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Climate Organizers: 2020 is the year to mobilize

January 23, 2020

~ by Jesse Remedios, Earth Beat, National Catholic Reporter

Catholic climate organizers say they’re certain of it: 2020 is “absolutely the year” for climate mobilization.

November 4, 2020, the United States is schedule to officially withdraw from the Paris Agrement on climate. That’s one day after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the outcome of which will largely shape the U.S. response to climate change moving forward.

With that in mind, the Catholic Climate Covenant is organizing what they are calling the “U.S. Catholic Climate Project , a yearlong intergenerational Catholic initiative to gather Catholics from across the church to make “the moral call for climate action.”

According the to the Climate Project’s website, the project will reach out to a range of Catholic institutions to provide support on activities that can galvanize action. To kick off the project, the Catholic Comate Covenant is hosting a webinar on webinar Jan. 23 to describe the initiative’s vision and goals, as well as explain how Catholics can collaborate to organize events around Earth Day and Laudato Si anniversaries.

Participation and leadership by youth and young adults is a big part of the Climate Project. The Catholic Climate Project understands that young people are the ones who will have to deal with the conseequences of climate inaction and, and project leadership is hoping to make use of young people’s passion for the issue to pull older generations into the fight.

“fundamentally, this is about the future of youth and young adults and their growing awareness of the interdependence between the Creator’s gift and the lives we lead,” said Jose Aguto, associate director of the Catholic Climate Covenant and co-chair of the Climate Project, told the NCR. “We of older generations have the moral obligation to support them.”

To read the entire article: https://www.ncronline.org/print/news/earthbeat/climate-organizers-2020-year-mobilize-young-people-lead

We are All Responsible to Protect the Amazon

October 30, 2019

~ by Barbara J. Fraser, Catholic News Service

Solutions to environmental problems discussed at the Synod of Bishops for the Amazon must involve not just Amazonian nations, but countries in Europe and North America, the bishops said.

Many of the environmental issues that synod participants have raised – including destruction of forests, pollution of rivers, rapacious mining and especially climate change – are also common to other tropical regions of the world

Those problems have roots in North America and Europe, although they often are exacerbated by policy loopholes and lack of enforcement in Amazonia countries, synod participants have said.

Synod participants described how mines, dams and other enterprises owned, built or operated by companies in industrialized countries displace local communities, affecting the environment and disrupting people’s lives.

Global trade means that even consumers’ decisions leave a footprint in distant countries. For example, most of the deforestation in Brazil is for cattle ranching to export beef. And the demand for gold keeps prices high, encouraging miners to invade indigenous people’s territories in remote parts of the Amazon. Their unregulated operations leave a scene
that resembles a cratered moonscape where rivers are poisoned with mercury and cyanide.

“No one can say, ‘I’m not responsible, it’s not my fault,’” said Bishop Karel Choennie of Suriname. “We are all responsible.”

The economic and social costs are borne by indigenous villagers and small farmers in the Amazon, said Josianne Gauther, executive secretary of CIDSE, an international consortium of Catholic development agencies and an invited guest at the synod.

“It’s colonialism – you externalize the costs to another population that you consider inferior or of less value,” she said. “It’s a one-directional relationship, where you exploit and live well, while the others suffer the consequences.”

People in places like North America and Europe do not always see that “environmental degradation and human rights violations (in the Amazon) are connected to our behaviors or policies or trade agreements” elsewhere in the world, she said.

People begin to understand the impact of their consumer choices and the policies of their countries when they come face to face with

Awareness Remains an Issue as Global Climate Strikes Draw Millions

October 2, 2019

~ by Brian Rowe, National Catholic Reporter

After roughly 6,000 actions in 180-plus countries bookended by two main days of demonstrations, the third global climate strike has come to a close. In 185 countries, the September 20 and 27 global climate strikes drew an estimated 7.6 million people young and old to 6,100 actions according to organizers who called it the largest-yet distributed mobilization calling for action on climate change.

A day after the September 20 strikes, the U.N. presented the Fridays for Future movement, inspired by Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg who joined strikers in New York City.

Before and after the strikes, Thunberg pressed elected leaders and older generations to save any plaudits for the youth strikers. Instead, she urged them to first listen who what climate scientists are saying – that global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut in half by 2030, and reach net zero by 2015. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight,” she said in a speech September 23 at the U.N. Climate Action Summit.

Mitzi Tan, a 21 year-old recent college graduate who joined the strike in Quezon City, Philippines, said, “people don’t realize how bad the situation is here.” The archipelago nation is among the most vulnerable in the world to impacts from climate change, like more powerful typhoons, rising seas and strains on crop and fisheries production. Part of that, she said, is a lack of connecting observed changes to the impacts scientists have identified accompanying a warming climate. Another factor is people preoccupied with other pressing issues such as hunger, homelessness and rising oil prices.

Many of the strikes had an intergenerational aspect to them. Marilou Fernando-Canuzo, was inspired by her youngest son to join the Fridays for Future movement. “A mother would naturally do anything to ensure that her children will have a bright future ahead or should I say, a better world to live in…climate change is no joke.” She hoped that the governments would take this seriously.

Superiors General Call for Broader Environmental Action and Stance on Church Abuse

May 9, 2019

Catholic sisters have a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead efforts to curb climate change and environmental degradation as individuals, communities and a network of congregations worldwide, Franciscan Sr. Sheila Kinsey told 850 superiors general of women religious congregations gathered May 7 in Rome during the second day of the International Union of Superiors Generals’ (USIG) plenary assembly. The gathered leaders were from 80 countries representing 450,00 women religious around the world.

Kinsey outlined steps taken since June 2018 when UISG launched the campaign Sowing Hope for the Planet to share environmental practices many communities have adopted for decades and efforts of women religious who are putting Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ into practice.

Sisters live and minister both in countries where lifestyle contributes to the rise in temperatures and in regions where climate change has the strongest effects. “Our communities are both intimate with the cause and effect,” Sr. Kinsey said. “With our personal commitment to one another, we are ideally positioned to respond compassionately in an integrated effort.”

Abuse and challenges
In light of the ongoing abuse scandal within the Church, the executive board of UISG issued a statement condemning any abuse of power and the “necessity to form the members of our congregations so that relationships at every level are healthy, respectful and mutual,” said Sr. Carmen Sammut, the outgoing UISG president.

Sr. Teresa Maya, former president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and a Sister of Charity of the Incarnate Word spoke of the current challenges in the Church. “Among all the different crises we are called to live and hope in, the one that must be named…is the crisis in our church. History will judge how we responded to this crisis. One day, women religious will be either accomplices or prophets or victims. We simply cannot sit this one out on the sidelines, even when we are being sidelined.” She explored how women religious can be “women of vision, seers of hope.”

She said that when she heard Sr. Veronica Openibo, leader of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, address the [recent] Vatican summit on abuse, she was filled with hope.

“We all stood with her as she witnessed for women the world over,” she said. She continued, “Our feminist legacy has a word of integrity to offer. Religious sisters should all be feminists, Christian feminists, who are committed to struggle and resist to ensure that women and men and children are all treated as human beings.” ~ Joyce Meyer and Gail DeGeorge, Global Sisters Report

Let Us Work Together to Protect Our Common Home

May 31, 2018

Religious and scientific leaders in Massachusetts, led by Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, joined forces last week to press the state to increase its actions on climate change to “protect our communities from the catastrophic impacts” of a warming planet.

More than 500 of the state’s scientists and religious leaders signed on the faith and science joint appeal for climate action, which was issued during a May 23 press conference at the Pastoral Center of the Boston Archdiocese in Braintree, MA.

Stating they were “motivated by the climate crisis,” the two contingents vowed to urge all sectors of civic life to take steps to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, the primary driver of climate change, and for the state’s elected representatives “to address the climate crisis with the boldness and urgency in requires with substantive and immediate action.”

“Climate change is an ecological and moral emergency that impacts all others aspects of our shared lives and requires us to work together to protect our common home,” the declaration said.

The scientists and religious leaders wrote, “We are called to be a beacon to the nation and the world. There is still time to take action, and that time is now.”

The appeal drew support from more than 100 scientists and representatives from the Jewish and Muslim faiths, as well as, numerous Protestant Christian denominations. In addition to O’Malley, Catholic signers included Bishop Robert McManus, of Worcester, MA, Fr. Michael McGarry, director of Boston’s Paulist Center, and Christina Leano and Fran Ludwig of the Global Catholic Climate Movement.

The statement borrowed some language from Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment and human ecology, Laudato Si on care for our common home. ~ National Catholic Reporter

To read the complete article: https://www.ncronline.org/news/environment/religious-leaders-scientists-massachusetts-together-declare-climate-change

Guadalupe Province and the MSC Institute Sign Catholic Climate Declaration

May 3, 2018

We have learned that Sr. Barbara Staley, MSC, General Superior, has signed onto the Declaration on behalf of the entire Institute of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

On numerous occasions Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have called for an international climate change agreement.

Climate change is an urgent moral issue because it compromises the future of our common home, threatens human life and human dignity, and adds to the hardships already experienced by the poorest and most vulnerable people both at home and abroad. We teach that governments exist to protect and promote the common good, and that “the climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all.” (Laudato Si’, 23).

In December 2015, the leaders of 195 nations adopted the Paris Agreement that established a framework for nations to reduce carbon emissions to limit the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels, and to avoid the most dangerous effects of climate change. The Holy See and the U.S. Bishops have repeatedly voiced their support for it.

On June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris agreement, the only nation to do so.

As Catholic communities, organizations, and institutions in the United States, we join with other institutions from across American society to ensure that the United States remains a global leader in reducing emissions. We call for the Administration to join the global community and return to the Paris Agreement.

After the receipt of this letter from Bishop Richard Pates from the Diocese of Des Moines regarding the U.S. Catholic Climate Declaration, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Guadalupe Province, have signed this Declaration joining their support with other similarly concerned Catholic organizations. The last paragraph of the letter includes a link where interested entities can enroll.

Dear friends,

I write to seek your support for the U.S. Catholic Climate Declaration, a distinct Catholic expression of the We Are Still In (WASI) campaign. Archbishop Broglio, Bishop Dewane, and I sent a similar appeal to our fellow bishops in the United States, and we now invite you to sign the Declaration.

Why this effort?

The WASI campaign is an effort to demonstrate America’s commitment to address climate change after President Trump announced on June 1, 2017 his intention to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. On that day, the U.S. bishops added their voice to the many groups expressing disappointment with this decision. A few days later, American civil society launched the We Are Still In campaign to show the world that America’s leaders stand by the Paris Agreement and are committed to meeting its goals. To date, over 2,600 institutions—including cities, states, tribes, businesses, investors, universities, non-profits, and places of worship—have joined the campaign, representing the largest cross-section of American society ever to support climate action.

Today, we ask your organization’s endorsement of the Catholic Climate Declaration.

This declaration is a distinct Catholic expression in support of the We Are Still In campaign. The Catholic Climate Declaration expresses the moral imperative to protect and promote human life and human dignity, the poorest and most vulnerable peoples, and our common home. It recognizes—as the U.S. bishops said in 2001—that:

At its core, global climate change is not about economic theory or political platforms, nor about partisan advantage or interest group pressures. It is about the future of God’s creation and the one human family. It is about protecting both “the human environment” and the natural environment. It is about our human stewardship of God’s creation and our responsibility to those who come after us.

Catholic Teaching on Climate Change

Beginning with Saint John Paul in 1990, the Catholic Church has accepted the reality of human-forced climate change and expressed concern about the moral consequences of global warming. The Church has repeatedly advocated for an international climate change agreement in respon

se to this existential threat. The Paris Agreement is an international effort adopted by 195 nations and supported by the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). It recognizes that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and it establishes a framework to limit the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels.

This effort is being coordinated by Catholic Climate Covenant, a USCCB-supported organization whose mission is to inspire and equip people andinstitutions in the U.S. to care for creation and for the poor in response to Church teaching on climate change. Commitments to the Catholic Climate Declaration will be made public on the third anniversary of the release of Laudato Sí, June 18, 2018.

If you wish to enroll your Catholic institution, organization, or community, please go to http://www.catholicclimatecovenant.org/catholic-climate-declaration

We hope you will join us in response to our Catholic faith.

Yours in Christ,

Bishop Richard E. Pates

Diocese of Des Moines

Episcopal Liaison, Catholic Climate Covenant

Pope Francis Sends Message to Faith and Community Leaders meeting in Modesto, CA

February 17, 2017

Pope Francis has sent a message to hundreds of faith and community leaders taking part in a national meeting of popular movements in Modesto, California, in the United States.

The encounter, taking place from February 16th to 18th, has been organised with the support of the Vatican’s new Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development, the U.S. Catholic Campaign for Human Development and the National Network of People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO).

In the message, the Pope encourages participants to persevere with their commitment to fight for social justice, to work for environmental protection and to stand in solidarity with refugees and migrants.

Please find below the full English language text of Pope Francis’ message:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

First of all, I would like to congratulate you for your effort in replicating on a national level the work being developed in the World Meetings of Popular Movements. By way of this letter, I want to encourage and strengthen each one of you, your organizations, and all who strive with you for “Land, Work and Housing,” the three T’s in Spanish: Tierra, Trabajo y Techo. I congratulate you for all that you are doing.

I would like to thank the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, its chairman Bishop David Talley, and the host Bishops Stephen Blaire, Armando Ochoa and Jaime Soto, for the wholehearted support they have offered to this meeting. Thank you, Cardinal Peter Turkson, for your continued support of popular movements from the new Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development. It makes me very happy to see you working together towards social justice! How I wish that such constructive energy would spread to all dioceses, because it builds bridges between peoples and individuals. These are bridges that can overcome the walls of exclusion, indifference, racism, and intolerance.

I would also like to highlight the work done by the PICO National Network and the organizations promoting this meeting. I learned that PICO stands for “People Improving Communities through Organizing”. What a great synthesis of the mission of popular movements: to work locally, side by side with your neighbors, organizing among yourselves, to make your communities thrive.

A few months ago in Rome, we talked at the third World Meeting of Popular Movements about walls and fear, about bridges and love. Without wanting to repeat myself, these issues do challenge our deepest values.

We know that none of these ills began yesterday. For some time, the crisis of the prevailing paradigm has confronted us. I am speaking of a system that causes enormous suffering to the human family, simultaneously assaulting people’s dignity and our Common Home in order to sustain the invisible tyranny of money that only guarantees the privileges of a few. “In our time humanity is experiencing a turning-point in its history.”

As Christians and all people of good will, it is for us to live and act at this moment. It is “a grave responsibility, since certain present realities, unless effectively dealt with, are capable of setting off processes of dehumanization which would then be hard to reverse.” These are signs of the times that we need to recognize in order to act. We have lost valuable time: time when we did not pay enough attention to these processes, time when we did not resolve these destructive realities. Thus the processes of dehumanization accelerate. The direction taken beyond this historic turning-point—the ways in which this worsening crisis gets resolved—will depend on people’s involvement and participation and, largely, on yourselves, the popular movements.

We should be neither paralyzed by fear nor shackled within the conflict. We have to acknowledge the danger but also the opportunity that every crisis brings in order to advance to a successful synthesis. In the Chinese language, which expresses the ancestral wisdom of that great people, the word “crisis” is comprised of two ideograms: Wēi, which represents “danger”, and Jī, which represents “opportunity”.

The grave danger is to disown our neighbors. When we do so, we deny their humanity and our own humanity without realizing it; we deny ourselves, and we deny the most important Commandments of Jesus. Herein lies the danger, the dehumanization. But here we also find an opportunity: that the light of the love of neighbor may illuminate the Earth with its stunning brightness like a lightning bolt in the dark; that it may wake us up and let true humanity burst through with authentic resistance, resilience and persistence.

The question that the lawyer asked Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37) echoes in our ears today: “Who is my neighbor?” Who is that other whom we are to love as we love ourselves? Maybe the questioner expects a comfortable response in order to carry on with his life: “My relatives? My compatriots? My co-religionists? …” Maybe he wants Jesus to excuse us from the obligation of loving pagans or foreigners who at that time were considered unclean. This man wants a clear rule that allows him to classify others as “neighbor” and “non-neighbor”, as those who can become neighbors and those who cannot become neighbors.

Jesus responds with a parable which features two figures belonging to the elite of the day and a third figure, considered a foreigner, a pagan and unclean: the Samaritan. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, the priest and the Levite come upon a dying man, whom robbers have attacked, stripped and abandoned. In such situations the Law of the Lord imposes the duty to offer assistance, but both pass by without stopping. They were in a hurry. However, unlike these elite figures, the Samaritan stopped. Why him? As a Samaritan he was looked down upon, no one would have counted on him, and in any case he would have had his own commitments and things to do—yet when he saw the injured man, he did not pass by like the other two who were linked to the Temple, but “he saw him and had compassion on him” (v. 33). The Samaritan acts with true mercy: he binds up the man’s wounds, transports him to an inn, personally takes care of him, and provides for his upkeep. All this teaches us that compassion, love, is not a vague sentiment, but rather means taking care of the other to the point of personally paying for him. It means committing oneself to take all the necessary steps so as to “draw near to” the other to the point of identifying with him: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is the Lord’s Commandment.

The economic system that has the god of money at its center, and that sometimes acts with the brutality of the robbers in the parable, inflicts injuries that to a criminal degree have remained neglected. Globalized society frequently looks the other way with the pretence of innocence. Under the guise of what is politically correct or ideologically fashionable, one looks at those who suffer without touching them. But they are televised live; they are talked about in euphemisms and with apparent tolerance, but nothing is done systematically to heal the social wounds or to confront the structures that leave so many brothers and sisters by the wayside. This hypocritical attitude, so different from that of the Samaritan, manifests an absence of true commitment to humanity.

Sooner or later, the moral blindness of this indifference comes to light, like when a mirage dissipates. The wounds are there, they are a reality. The unemployment is real, the violence is real, the corruption is real, the identity crisis is real, the gutting of democracies is real. The system’s gangrene cannot be whitewashed forever because sooner or later the stench becomes too strong; and when it can no longer be denied, the same power that spawned this state of affairs sets about manipulating fear, insecurity, quarrels, and even people’s justified indignation, in order to shift the responsibility for all these ills onto a “non-neighbor”. I am not speaking of anyone in particular, I am speaking of a social and political process that flourishes in many parts of the world and poses a grave danger for humanity.

Jesus teaches us a different path. Do not classify others in order to see who is a neighbor and who is not. You can become neighbor to whomever you meet in need, and you will do so if you have compassion in your heart. That is to say, if you have that capacity to suffer with someone else. You must become a Samaritan. And then also become like the innkeeper at the end of the parable to whom the Samaritan entrusts the person who is suffering. Who is this innkeeper? It is the Church, the Christian community, people of compassion and solidarity, social organizations. It is us, it is you, to whom the Lord Jesus daily entrusts those who are afflicted in body and spirit, so that we can continue pouring out all of his immeasurable mercy and salvation upon them. Here are the roots of the authentic humanity that resists the dehumanization that wears the livery of indifference, hypocrisy, or intolerance.

I know that you have committed yourselves to fight for social justice, to defend our Sister Mother Earth and to stand alongside migrants. I want to reaffirm your choice and share two reflections in this regard.

First, the ecological crisis is real. “A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.” Science is not the only form of knowledge, it is true. It is also true that science is not necessarily “neutral”—many times it conceals ideological views or economic interests. However, we also know what happens when we deny science and disregard the voice of Nature. I make my own everything that concerns us as Catholics. Let us not fall into denial. Time is running out. Let us act. I ask you again—all of you, people of all backgrounds including native people, pastors, political leaders—to defend Creation.

The other is a reflection that I shared at our most recent World Meeting of Popular Movements, and I feel is important to say it again: no people is criminal and no religion is terrorist. Christian terrorism does not exist, Jewish terrorism does not exist, and Muslim terrorism does not exist. They do not exist. No people is criminal or drug-trafficking or violent. “The poor and the poorer peoples are accused of violence yet, without equal opportunities, the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a fertile terrain for growth and will eventually explode.” There are fundamentalist and violent individuals in all peoples and religions—and with intolerant generalizations they become stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia. By confronting terror with love, we work for peace.

I ask you for meekness and resolve to defend these principles. I ask you not to barter them lightly or apply them superficially. Like Saint Francis of Assisi, let us give everything of ourselves: where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, let us sow pardon; where there is discord, let us sow unity; where there is error, let us sow truth.

Please know that I pray for you, that I pray with you, and I ask God our Father to accompany and bless you. May He shower you with his love and protect you. I ask you to please pray for me too, and to carry on.

Vatican City, 10 February 2017 (from Vatican Radio)

Cabrini High School Students Share Their Scientific Expertise

May 13, 2016

Cabrini Science Squad Visits St Rosalie School photo cr Cabrini High School’s Science Squad visited St. Rosalie School in Harvey, LA to introduce their students to some interesting science experiments.

Cabrini Science Instructors, Kathy Gosciniak and Lisa Surgi with the assistance of Cabrini students who are St. Rosalie alumnae Miranda Musacchia’17, and Angelle Falcon’17, led sixty members of Ms. Rotolo’s fifth grade science classes in a series of scientific tests on the properties of various toothpastes.

The Science Squad performed a series of physical tests on toothpastes, their ingredients and properties, including color/smell, abrasiveness, fluoride content, pH, and foaming properties. The young St. Rosalie “scientists” worked in pairs, utilizing stereoscopes, testing different brands of toothpaste. After the testing, the students shared their data with other pairs, compiling the data to create a more comprehensive database. The results of their research indicated there was little difference in the outcome among the five toothpaste brands tested, specifically not significant to justify the price differential among the brands.

“We received a positive response from Julie Rotolo the 4^th grade teacher at St. Rosalie, as she was surprised with the amount of testing that could be done within one class period,” noted Cabrini AP Chemistry/Chemistry Instructor Kathy Gosciniak. She continued, “the St. Rosalie students seemed to really enjoy the activity, so we hope this simple demonstration will help to spark their curiosity and interest in science.”

Spring into Science at Super Science Camp

April 7, 2016

Ann Smart, Science Department Head, led the campers on an adventure exploring the mysteries of solar power and plants during the Saturday morning camp. The campers started by threading UV light sensitive bead on ribbons to create necklaces. When exposed to UV light, the beads react by transforming from white to the colors of the spectrum, producing unique, rainbow colored necklaces. Campers also experimented with Sunprint paper, leaf prints, and flowers. Sunprints are filter paper dipped into chemicals to make the paper UV sensitive. Using stencils, the students exposed the paper to sunlight to form a blue and white print of the stencil.

During the plant section of the camp, the students created leaf prints by placing a leaf under a sheet of paper and gently rubbing the paper with colored pencil or crayon to show the leaf details. Campers also learned about plant reproduction by dissecting azaleas to identify the flowers’ petals, sepals, pistil, and stamen. For home study, the campers made “sock animals” by drawing faces on white socks, filling the socks with quick-growing grass seed and potting soil, and soaking the sock animals in water. In a few days, the sock animals will grow grass “hair,” allowing the campers to witness seed germination and plant growth.

Cabrini Super Science Saturday 3.19.16 Photo: Tyler Kaufman/©2016

“Best practices indicates that students grasp science and math concepts more readily when combined with practical application, so we incorporate theory and utility in all our STEM courses and activities, including our camps,” stated Smart. “The UV beads and sunprints allow the girls to grasp the existence and significance of UV light energy. When we introduce plant reproduction combined with the sunprints and the sock animals, the campers are able to witness how nature converts light, seeds, soil, and water into living, growing plants. It is an eye-opening moment for many youngsters as they realize for the first time all of the invisible and mysterious scientific processes occurring around them each and every day.”

Cabrini College students speaking truth to power

December 9, 2015

18 Cabrini College students made 38 lobby visits Friday on behalf of our brothers and sisters around the world who are refugees fleeing war, experiencing climate change, or hoping to live a fully human life. So proud of these students, as well as several hundred Cabrini students in prior years, who have risen to the challenge to master difficult material, negotiate political differences, discover their core values, overcome nervousness, in order to speak truth to power.

Well done! Wanda Hernandez, Cabrini Mission Corps Rachel Recolcolin, Julia Alexis, Sarah Davis, Cabrini Missioner Morgan Perry, CRS Ambassador Casey Semenza, Cabrini Missioner Vanessa Miranda, Katie Montella, Cristabel Ruiz, Mike Burrell, Jordan Floyd, Alissa Oliveras, Kiley Sharp, Jerome Bailey, Steve Halko, Leonard Brock, Amina Etienne, Kalle Blindenbacher

They spoke with aides to Senator Pat Toomey, Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr.,Congressman Joe Pitts, Congressman Robert Brady, Congressman Chaka Fattah, Congressman Patrick Meehan, and Congressman Brendan Boyle

Supporting the work of Catholic Relief Services and CRS University, they delivered 400 letters supporting CRS’s ‪#‎IAmClimateChange campaign and the Green Climate Fund. They spoke in support of $1 billion in additional funding for Syrian refugees, as well as to maintain or increase poverty-focused development assistance.

Beginning in 2008, students each semester have traveled to our nation’s Capitol to meet with our elected representatives in conjunction with Catholic Relief Services and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to “Confront Global Poverty.” This year, Pope Francis has placed special attention on Caring for Our Common Home and climate change, and these students responded by discussing climate change with congress during the very weeks leaders from around the world are meeting in Paris to come to an historic agreement.

Similarly, in this contentious time, these students also bravely spoke about Syrian refugees and our duty to protect refugees seeking safety.

These students truly continue the work of St. Frances Cabrini, the patron saint of immigrants, after whom Cabrini College is named. #JusticeMatters

More photos at https://www.flickr.com/ph