At the end of mass last Sunday, Margaret Rebecchi explained to the congregation of Our Lady of the Assumption Church the work she’s doing on behalf of the environment, including promoting a program to help all the churches in the Monterey Diocese install solar panels, which would help save $10 million in 10 years.
“You all know that Pope Francis has spoken very strongly about climate change,” Rebecchi says in Spanish. “Last year he published an encyclical called Laudato Si to explain that global warming is one of the biggest threats to the human family. He’s inviting us to have an ecological conversation and to take care of the planet, our home.”
She also gave a quick overview of a complicated initiative that’s been the subject of much debate among government officials in three Central Coast counties: Monterey Bay Community Power, an effort to create an agency to provide electricity to all residents of Monterey, San Benito and Santa Cruz counties.
“This governmental program would double the amount of renewable energy in the county only in the first year,” she tells the congregation. “It would establish a nonprofit agency that would sell electricity for the same amount or less than what we pay PG&E. The sale of electricity would remain in our hands and the profits would be used to create renewable energy projects like wind farms.”
The Catholic Church has been a surprising player and one of the major forces behind the local effort to create what could become the largest independent energy consortium in California. The idea behind the agency would be to purchase power from Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and use the profits to develop renewable sources of energy — something they say would help lower greenhouse emissions dramatically.
Sanctioned by Bishop Richard Garcia, the movement is being inspired by the teachings of Pope Francis who, in his 2015 encyclical subtitled “On Care for Our Common Home,” proclaimed the need to ratchet up efforts to protect the environment not just because it’s “God’s creation,” but because it’s the right thing to do for the poor.
“We’re following Pope Francis in his wonderful encyclical Laudato Si because that’s what we’re all about, maintaining and providing our environment for the people to live, to breathe, to move around with great love and great support from all of us,” Bishop Garcia said at a press conference in January.
If Catholics have only just recently been spurred to environmental action by Pope Francis, their activism in general is a time-honored tradition. Inspired by Liberation Theology, many prelates in Latin America openly advocated for the poor in the 1960s and ‘70s. People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), a coalition with 150 affiliates throughout the United States, was founded in 1972 by a Jesuit priest who had learned community organizing in Chicago and is working on social issues such as bank accountability, health care and immigration reform. Communities Organized for Relational Power in Action (COPA) was founded in 2003 on the Central Coast and has been behind several major social justice campaigns.
After Francis’ bold defense of the environment, the Catholic Church is poised to become a stronger voice against global warming and against the use of fossil fuels, something that’s already had major impact on the Central Coast.
Take Measure Z. The oil production control initiative on the Nov. 8 ballot faced huge opposition from the deep-pocketed oil industry. But Rebecchi, a longtime environmental activist and social justice promoter, used the pontiff’s message to convince Catholics like her to get out and vote in support. The Hollister resident, who had already helped pass a similar measure in San Benito County, drove up and down the Salinas Valley to spread Pope Francis’s message.
“In order to educate your Latinos you have to motivate them,” she said. “Once you motivate Latinos, they go out and vote. They said, ‘We have to vote no because of the jobs or schools.’ They were watching the (the opposition’s television) commercial every single day. So I thought, how am I going to get my message out?”
Rebecchi thought the message had to be simple and direct, and she decided it had to be about the potential contamination of water coupled with the pontiff’s message.
“The people could associate with the pope. It was about being stewards of the earth and about climate change. The pope is talking about climate change so of course people started saying, ‘let’s vote yes,’ ” she said.
Full story at The Monterey Herald.
This is a very good idea. Any effort to have a reduced impact on the environment and also save money has my support. By the way, I am a traditional Catholic.
Based on very bad science. It is very costly in the long run. CO2 is a gas of life as the historical geological record shows, the greater the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere the greater the biodiversity. Warmer climates have more biodiversity than colder.
Ah yes: More of the errors of Vatican II, ” Liberation Theology: many prelates in Latin America openly advocated for the poor in the 1960s and ‘70’s.” The Red Bishop of Vatican II (one of many), Dom Helder Camara, and look at the destruction wrought, spiritually and economically in Brazil.
The “auto-demolizione”, auto-destruction of the Church Paul VI even witnessed to, occasioned by the Council (Lombard College Address, Dec. 7, 1968).
There has been a big effort to deny the original text published on Dec. 13, 1968, L’Osservatore Romano, English version, of this speech: the principal parts are:
“The Church finds herself in an hour of anxiety, a disturbed period of self-criticism, or what would even better be called auto-destruction. It is an acute and complicated upheaval,which nobody could have expected after the Council. It is almost as if the Church were attacking herself.”
“We looked forward to a flowering, a serene expansion of concepts which matured in the great sessions of the council… one must notice above all the sorrowful aspect. It is as if the Church were destroying herself.” –Paul VI, Address to the Lombard College 12/7/68
The…
The original and complete text of this speech appeared in the following Friday weekly L’Osservatore Romano, 12/13/1968, the official mouthpiece of the Vatican, and contained more information than the 3rd-party shorthand notes in the Italian Vatican.va version. My tet is from the LOR version.
The Vatican.va version is here:
https://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/it/speeches/1968/december/documents/hf_p-vi_spe_19681207_seminario-lombardo.html
Vatican.va is known to edit, revise and remove content that is controversial. Those who cite the Italian version obviously do not know this is a summary of the speech, not the speech (it speaks of the Holy Father in the 3rd person at the outset, greeting the assembled persons, no…
In fact, Paul VI twice unwillingly referenced the “auto-destruction”—his word, in Italian “auto-demolizione” — of the Church, returning to the theme of the expected “flowering” of the Church after Vatican II, and instead—catastrophe. That was in the famous “Smoke of Satan in the Sanctuaries” speech on SS Peter and Paul feast, before about 30 cardinals, on 29 June 1972.
Blogger Donald McClarey has done a great job of listing all the original, undeniable sources, in which Paul VI, big proponent of Vatican II, nonetheless admitted its disastrous effects, here:
https://www.catholicstand.com/109/
McClarey has also related the “Smoke of Satan” speech to the Liberation Theology invasion that Dom Helder Camara and…
and other starry-eyed prelates became infatuated with after the Council in Latin America, here:
https://the-american-catholic.com/2015/05/08/popewatch-liberation-theology-and-the-smoke-of-satan/
The LOR version quoted is the LOR official English version, so there can be no question of the authenticity, accuracy, and completeness of the original text, since it more completely and logically quotes Paul VI, by far more so than the shortened, perplexingly unclear, 3rd-party summary contained in Vatican.va.
and as the first of her signs, she changed water into ethanol.
When the Church enters the Public Political arena, it needs care who and what gets the “$Political Dollars” collected from the Faithful in the pews and often levied / tithed to the Diocese:
” Inspired by Liberation Theology – 1972 Jesuit priest who had learned community organizing in Chicago and is working on social issues such as bank accountability, health care and immigration reform. (COPA) was founded in 2003 on the Central Coast and has been behind several major social justice campaigns.
PICO (among other similar groups) is a Soros funded “organization” that works to convince bishops that the Catholic Church places too much emphasis on abortion and euthanasia, and not enough on poverty and the environment. The Soros group is very pleased with the results. Looking to the future, they are excited that the long-term goal of shifting the priorities of the Catholic Bishops in the United States “is now underway.” They want us distracted from life issues and morality. Concern for the poor and good stewardship are important in living our faith, but forsaking our foundational doctrines in exchange for political agendas makes us just another community organization. Bishops need to wake up. Christ told us the poor will always be…
The Jesuit priest who founded “Oakland Training Institute”, later “Pacific Institute of Community Organizing”, now “People Improving Communities through Organizing”, is Fr. John Baumann, SJ, who personally studied with Saul Alinsky in the 1960’s while at the soon-to-be defunct Jesuit School of Theology at Chicago (JSTC). The late Fr. Jerry Helfrich, SJ, also was a proud co-student of Alinsky, and the result is the cancerous community organizing, totally secular-atheist political apparatus, PICO.
I always wondered if either Fr. John or Fr. Jerry, both of whom I met and knew well n those days, had any qualms about their org handing out copies of Rules for Radicals, the frontispiece of which contains Saul Alinsky’s dedication of the book to Lucifer, “the first radical.”
Here is that page:
https://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/images/item/beck-rules-3.jpg
…with us. The state of our planet is in God’s hands and He alone will decide when it will cease to exist. Humans always seek to be in control of everything and this is no exception. Reason and stewardship should leave room for our primary responsibilities as Catholics: to live and share our faith so that all souls may attain heaven and see the face of Our Lord.
Agreed, Alice.
But while we extemporize, enviromentalistas, misplaced as Church “leaders” like Rebecchi, believe they have completed the transformation of the Catholic Faith.
Now, most people think Catholic belief to be a Bergoglioesque jumble of renewable-energy, Earth-First, yay-LGBT!, divorce-OK, contraception-tolerant, casual-sex-OK, socialist-redistribution, pro-mass-unchecked-immigration, positions.
And note this Rebecchi, like all the operatives, never, never mention Jesus Christ.
Because His Gospel has nothing to do with their Brave New Church.