Save the date for our 'Care for our Common Home' (Laudato Si) Parish Forum to be held at St Ambrose’s Centre, Brunswick on Saturday 14 September. Taking place in the 'Season of Creation', this forum is part of our ongoing series to assist parish communities to respond to Pope Francis' call to take better care of our common home and the poor. 

 

In 2005, Pope Benedict XIV said “The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. The earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction”[1]. Drawing on this passage in his 2015 Encyclical Laudato Si’ – Care of our Common Home, Pope Francis added: “For this reason, the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion” (n217).

 

Some parishes have been able to respond to Pope Francis’ urgent call to action, but many have found it challenging to put it into practice. How might we as individuals and communities achieve a change of heart, live more simply, care better for the poor, endangered species, our world? In this forum, we will review the Pope’s call to “interior conversion” and consider what this means for us, our families and our parishes.  

 

Last year on 15 September, we hosted a similar parish forum titled Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’: Transforming Communities, which was held at Box Hill. Christine Kennedy, Sr Caroline Vaitkunas and Robyn Humphery from Endeavour Hills, Elwood and St Kilda West and Cheltenham parishes told of their parish initiatives responding to the encyclical, what had been learned, and future activities.