"Catholics care about climate change. It;s time to take action together."~ Catholic Climate Covenant.
The 2023 Laudato Si’ and the U.S. Catholic Church national conference was held virtually over a series of evenings starting on June 14th and concluding on July 27th. The biennial conference series was co-sponsored by Creighton University and Catholic Climate Covenant. The hyperlinks below are to YouTube videos of the Opening Session and Laudato Si’ Action Platform’s seven goals:
Opening Session June 14, 2023, featured Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) who brokered the Paris Agreement.
Session #2 - Response to the Cry of the Poor “is a call to protect our common home for the wellbeing of all, as we equitably address the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ecological sustainability.”
Session #3 - Ecological Economics - "More than 130 years of Catholic social teaching directly challenges core pillars of mainstream capitalism which celebrates unbridled exploitation of non-human nature and externalizes ecological costs like pollution from business calculations. Panelists shared how such a perspective is incongruent with the Laudato Si' Action Platform's goal and fidelity to Catholic social teaching."
Session #4 - Adoption of Sustainable Lifestyles is "grounded in the idea of sufficiency and promoting sobriety in the use of resources and energy".
Session #5 - Ecological Education aims to "re-think and re-design curricular and institutional reform in the spirit of integral ecology in order to foster ecological awareness and transformative action."
Session #7 - Community Resilience Empowerment "envisages a synodal journey of community engagement and participatory action at various levels".
Session #8 - Response to the Cry of the Earth "is a call to protect our common home for the wellbeing of all, as we equitably address the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and ecological sustainability".