LEADING the world’s Catholics along a journey of action in caring for creation, Pope Francis put out the call for Catholics to join a global grassroots movement to build a more inclusive, fraternal, peaceful and sustainable world.
The new initiative, the Laudato Si’ Action Platform, is “a seven-year journey that will see our communities committed in different ways to becoming totally sustainable, in the spirit of integral ecology,” Pope Francis said in a video message released on May 25.
In Brisbane, Catholic Justice and Peace Commission executive officer Peter Arndt had tuned in to Pope Francis’ launch of the action platform.
He said it was a significant step ahead of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development’s hard launch of the action platform set for five months’ time on the feast of St Francis of Assisi.
The Laudato Si’ Action Platform will provide a series of online resources for people to respond to Pope Francis’ call.
The platform is meant to help those who want to increase their commitment to bringing Laudato Si’ to life by promising a set of actions over a period of seven years.
“This platform asks people in families, parishes, schools, religious congregations, hospitals and this diocese at its central level to be committing to making a plan over seven years to respond to the call to ecological conversion,” Mr Arndt said.
Mr Arndt said a local Laudato Si’ Action Plan had been in the works for some time and was likely to be launched in 2022.
He said he hoped at the end of the seven-year process for a fundamental transformation of the spirituality of Catholics individually and organisationally in the archdiocese and around the world.
“It is more than a call to undertake greening initiatives and forget about the rest; it’s more than installing solar panels and saving water – they’re all extremely important – but it’s more than that,” he said.
“Laudato Si’ challenges the consumerist, materialist mentality and challenges us all to be attentive and to respond to the cries of the poor, including the cries of the earth.
“I’m hoping that the mindset of Catholics and Catholic entities throughout the archdiocese will fundamentally shift so that we are deeply attentive to those cries and that we are living concretely in a way that responds to those cries, and in so doing, being more faithful to the Gospel.”
Pope Francis said in his video message the world needed a new ecological approach that could “transform our way of dwelling in the world, our lifestyles, our relationship with the resources of the Earth and, in general, our way of looking at humanity and of living life”.
This can only come about by everyone working together in a co-ordinated effort, he said.
“Only in this way will we be able to create the future we want: a more inclusive, fraternal, peaceful and sustainable world,” he said.
Pope Francis’ message was released on the last day of Laudato Si’ Week — the “crowning event” of a special Laudato Si’ Anniversary Year, which closed May 24.
But the end of anniversary celebrations of Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical, “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home,” ushered in a new wave of initiatives including a new website in nine languages at laudatosi.va and an action platform at laudatosiplatform.org as part of a “road map” of action for the next decade.