In harmony with Pope Francis’ call in Laudato Si’ to “care for our common home”, the Sisters of the Holy Cross have a long-standing commitment to ecological sustainability and systemic change across the globe. Among the Congregation’s initiatives to care for creation and God’s people is SOAR (Sisters Organizing and Advancing Recycling), a project launched…
Read moreTwo projects, systems of agroforestry, are helping bring life back to the land in Central America Rainforests are the most productive ecosystems on the planet, and yet we take the opposite approach when growing food. We slash and burn vast areas of forest to make way for cattle and monoculture crops that require billions of…
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About thirty members of the Comboni Family (Lay, Secular, Religious, men and women, from Africa, America and Europe), met from July 27 to August 3, 2022, in Belém, capital of Pará, Brazil, on the occasion of the X Pan-Amazonian Social Forum (X FOSPA) and the Comboni Meeting on Integral Ecology. Here the Letter they sent…
Read moreThe yearly UN climate summit or Conference of the Parties (COP) produces international agreements that guide countries in their response to the climate crisis. At least, it should. Instead, the climate pacts so far have largely played into the already inaccessible climate discourse. High-minded rhetoric excludes the people most impacted by the climate crisis by…
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In the Philippines, the missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) are committing to plant 100,000 seedlings of Bamboo by 2022. With an ambitious goal for planting 1 billion bamboos by 2030, collaborating with the local churches of parishes and dioceses in the Philippines. But why Bamboo? The first reason is climate change.…
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Indeed, the Pygmies have always been the caretakers of the forest, truly forest advocates. Messok Dja, an area of Congo rainforest especially rich in biodiversity, is the ancestral land of the Baka people who have managed the forest since time immemorial. The Baka are one of the many Pygmy groups living in the forest spreading…
Read moreAs the power of corporations has grown, so should their responsibility towards human rights and our planet. Yet the reality is that around the world, harms to people’s rights through business activities continue to take place with impunity. In 2014 the UN Human Rights Council started a process to establish a treaty to regulate transnational corporations…
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The food crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic has opened new ways towards sustainability and self-reliance through vegetable gardens in the less-privileged communities of Johannesburg. In February 2020, Seed Community’s Green Business College (GBC) in partnership with Tim Nectare Farms launched the Ubuntu Project (www.ubuntuproject. africa) aimed at providing fresh food boxes and setting up…
Read more“Mining activities have huge impacts on the lives of the local communities and indigenous people in Brazil. I come from a country where mining has caused immeasurable disasters from colonial times to today”. A Comboni Missionary talk about his involvement in mining advocacy. The largest open-pit iron mine operates in the land where I worked…
Read moreBig rivers emerge from small springs. They spring forth in remote hills. Big ideas to change the world are also born on the edge. Great movements to transform societies do not start from the centre: they start in small places and incubate in some unknown sections of society. Rosa Parks refused to give up her…
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“A simple reception and some kind of accommodation” are “very different from a process of integration”. A personal experience. In about the year 2000, the U.K. government decided that it would send the largest number of its asylum seekers to Glasgow, an area that had never had new arrivals in large numbers except escapees from…
Read moreTo Missionaries, living the Gospel in a radical fashion is a way of advocating for the poor and the earth. The devise, Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation is a distant horizon that, however, continually attracts and directs their fragile and sometimes contradictory steps. One of these steps is to invest in the agroecology promoted…
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When asked how a farmer’s daughter who became a Catholic nun ended up as one of Brazil’s most influential refugee advocates, Sister Rosita Milesi, 79,…
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Vusi was an honest man and a hard worker. He had cleared a large piece of moorland and turned it into a beautiful fertile field. He…
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On 24 November, the Solemnity of Christ the King, on the occasion of World Youth Day in the Particular Churches, in St. Peter's Basilica the traditional…
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