The Passionist Charism and Care of Creation by Kyle Kramer, Passionist Earth and Spirit Center

​Vowed and lay Passionists can find encouragement and guidance for ecological awareness and action not only from our pontiffs and other Church teachings, but also from the unique Passionist charism itself.  

​In 2015, Pope Francis released his landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’.  Widely ,(mis)categorized as “just” an environmental encyclical, Laudato Si’ is actually a bold statement about the deep interwoveness of spiritual, social, and environmental realities.  “Everything is interconnected,” writes the Pope who took the name of the patron saint of ecology, “and…genuine care for our own lives and our relationships with nature is inseparable from fraternity, justice and faithfulness to others.”  Even before Pope Francis, Saint John Paul II wrote in 1990 that “the ecological crisis is a moral issue.”  Pope Benedict stressed that “[p]reservation of the environment, promotion of sustainable development and particular attention to climate change are matters of grave concern for the entire human family”, inseparable from “…the protection of human life, including the life of the unborn….” 

Vowed and lay Passionists can find encouragement and guidance for ecological awareness and action not only from our pontiffs and other Church teachings, but also from the unique Passionist charism itself.  One of the Passionist commitments is to a life of prayer and contemplation.  As Passionist Thomas Berry and others have pointed out, the natural world is the primary sacrament by which God is made visible in the world.  We, like the psalmists long before us, encounter God through the beauty and wonder of God’s creation – which is, after all, the source of the waters of baptism and the bread and wine of the Eucharist.  Protecting the natural world is the only way we can safeguard our own religious imagination and our capacity to contemplate the Lord through his works. 
 
Passionists also have a unique calling to be in solidarity with the crucified of today: fellow human beings who are poor and on the margins of society.  This human solidarity also requires engagement with environmental concerns, because it is the poor who suffer first and foremost from environmental harm, even though they generally have contributed the least to its causes.  It is the poor who have to live near landfills and strip mines and polluting factories.  It is the poor who are on the frontlines of the droughts, floods, and other challenges caused by global warming – and who have the fewest resources with which to deal with them.  If Passionists are in solidarity with the poor as part of our charism, we must care for the Earth and live responsibility so as not to cause harm to the least of our brothers and sisters, both now and in future generations.
 
Finally, Christ is crucified every day in the suffering of the Earth itself, which is not just inanimate matter, but is abounding in non-human life forms, all of which are precious in God’s eyes.  All of God’s creatures – two-legged, four-legged, six-legged, winged, leafed, finned – are vulnerable to the shrinking and degradation of their habitat due to human activities.  And as Scripture says, even the very land itself calls out, groaning for redemption.  We cannot be in solidarity with the suffering Earth without also making some effort to relieve that suffering through our actions.  
 
Now that we understand the degree of connection between spiritual, social, and ecological health, it is no longer possible for Passionists to ignore the plight of God’s Creation and still stay within the teaching of our Church and the calling of our charism.  Our own particular roles will unfold as our particular circumstances dictate, but we all have a great and unavoidable invitation to embody environmental responsibility in our individual lives, the policies of our institutions, and in the teaching and preaching we share with so many others.  We pray that God give us the courage, creativity, and fortitude to take on this opportunity to grow as Passionists and as members of the single, sacred Earth community.