At his general audience on May 21, the Pope said polluting or destroying the environment amounts to telling God one doesn't like his creation.

Safeguarding creation is safeguarding a gift from God, he continued.

"This must be our attitude toward creation - safeguarding it. If not, if we destroy creation, creation will destroy us. Don't forget that!"

Speaking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Pope said the gift of knowledge helps us see the environment with God's eyes.

We can recognise its beauty and see it as a sign of God's love for men and women, who are the crown of God's creation, he explained.

"Creation is not a property that we can dominate at our pleasure nor does it belong to only a few," the Pope said. "

One day before the Pope's comments, the National Catholic Reporter in the US issued an editorial under the heading "Climate Change is church's No. 1 pro-life issue".

"If there is a certain wisdom in the pro-life assertion that other rights become meaningless if the right to life is not upheld, then it is reasonable to assert that the right to life has little meaning if the earth is destroyed to the point where life becomes unsustainable," the editorial argued.

Noting the threat to humans from climate change reported in the third US National Climate Assessment, the NCR stated the problem is enormous.

"But so is the opportunity for the Church to use its resources, its access to some of the best experts in its academies and the attention of those in its parochial structures to begin to educate," the editorial continued.

"This is a human life issue of enormous proportions, and one in which the young should be fully engaged."

A five day sustainability summit was recently held at the Vatican.

Sources

• Catholic News Service
• National Catholic Reporter
• Huffington Post
• Image: Salon.com

He wasn't. But I was and so was most of the rapt, standing-room-only crowd that crammed the Greek Theatre at University of California, Berkeley, for the second of three sold-out Mumford & Sons concerts in late May.

This is what I had come for — not just a concert, but a shared experience with a congregation of strangers (and a few friends).

"Love, it will not betray you, dismay or enslave you, it will set you free," Marcus Mumford and his bandmates — Ben Lovett, Winston Marshall and Ted Dwane — sang. "There is a design, an alignment, a cry of my heart to see, the beauty of love as it was made to be."

More biblical allusions, declarations of spiritual yearning and what felt like prayers of the heart followed during the 90-minute show and the remaining two concerts.

I was not surprised. As a longtime fan, it was what I had expected to hear. Since their debut in 2009, Mumford & Sons has achieved monumental success, both critically and commercially, particularly among a subset of diehard fans I'd describe as the spiritual-but-not-religious.

It's a modifier that could be (and has been) applied to the band members themselves. Frontman and lyricist Mumford, 26, who was born in Anaheim, Calif., is the son of John and Eleanor Mumford, founders of the evangelical, charismatic Vineyard Churches in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He is a pastor's kid, reared in the church where his musical vocation first took root.

Recently, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine where he was asked about his religious predilections, Mumford declined to affix the "Christian" label to himself, causing a lot of handwringing from some evangelical fans who thought he was "one of ours."

His spiritual life is a "work in progress," Mumford said, adding that he has never doubted the existence of God and that his pastoring parents aren't lamenting the condition of his soul. Continue reading

Sources

• Cathleen Falsani in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Global Cool

Cathleen Falsani is the faith and values columnist for The Orange County Register.

But while he shies away from the name for fear that the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) will be misinterpreted as a "cult of personality," the center's staff is working diligently to transform its programming so the legacy of Rohr's work and tradition that has inspired him will endure.

"We are challenging people to go deep with Richard's work," says Matt Sholler, associate director of the Living School, the center's newest and largest endeavor. "Our hope is that they will find new applications for his ideas and create new acts of compassion in the world."

The Living School is the flagship program of The Rohr Institute, which was created "so that we could have a place where we can have greater conversations about the perennial tradition," says Alicia Johnson, executive director of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Philosophers and theologians have spoken of a perennial philosophy for centuries. The idea, in a nutshell, is that all of the world's religious knowledge is based on shared universal truths.

For Rohr, the perennial tradition "encompasses the recurring themes in all of the world's religions and philosophies," all of which say:

• There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things;
• there is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity and longing for this Divine Reality; and
• the final goal of existence is union with this Divine Reality.

Although the Living School will be a school of thought, practice and experience will be equally essential components of the course of study.

"We start with experiential, not the didactic," Sholler says. "There will be a healthy amount of academic-minded curriculum, but what will make the school distinctive is how we incorporate lived experience. How we build our experiential practices into the curriculum is the most challenging and creative opportunity for us in developing the school." Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Spiritual Journey
• This is part three of a three-part series. Find all of the segments here

"Barring women from ordination to the priesthood is an injustice that cannot be allowed to stand," the paper said in a December 3 editorial.

Continue reading

When the U.S. bishops came out so strongly against the new government rules regarding contraceptives and health insurance, they said the issue was one of religious freedom.

And I believed them.

When the bishops argued that it was not the administration's place to decide whether Catholic hospitals or colleges fit the "faith mission" exception to the insurance rule, it made sense to me.

And I believed them.

I thought the bishops were trying to make an argument apart from the politics of the moment, separate from the polarizing stances they have so often taken in the last few years, stances that had placed them in league with odd allies from the far right.

I feel like an idiot.

After the Obama administration announced adjustments to the contraception rule that would remove the church from directly having to pay for contraceptive coverage in health plans, many Catholics responded with relief, including Catholic Charities and the Catholic Health Association. The bishops' objections seemed understood, and the public at large was not denied access.

But the bishops were not to be denied a wedge issue. After initially sounding open to the compromise, they soon came down firmly against something that was just not good enough. The bishops now say they will throw their support behind a Republican-sponsored bill in Congress that would exempt any individual insurance provider or purchaser from any mandate that doesn't mesh with their religious beliefs. It is yet another not-so-subtle attempt to essentially gut the health care reform law.

And now the story has entered into absurdity, a land often explored when the bishops find themselves all puffed up on matters of sexuality and gender. Read more

Sources

• Joe Ferullo in the National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Reuters

A lot has changed in parish life in a quarter-century, yet American Catholics are still predominantly attached to territorial parishes headed by a priest pastor. The model is being stretched and transformed, however, by tremendous demographic changes in the Catholic population. Church leaders are struggling to keep up.

In the years since we began this series on American Catholic laity, the Catholic population in the United States has increased by more than a fifth. It continues to grow at about 1 percent a year and even conservative estimates project that Catholics will top 100 million by the middle of the 21st century. The Catholic population is becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse as well, influenced by immigration from predominantly Catholic countries around the world.

Catholics are also more dispersed geographically than they were in 1987, continuing a late 20th-century pattern of movement out of the inner cities and into the suburbs, out of the traditional Catholic strongholds in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest and into the rapidly growing Sun Belt cities in the South and the Southwest. An unintended consequence of this growth and migration has been a mismatch between Catholic institutions and Catholic population. While more and more large, once-beautiful urban parishes and elementary schools in the traditional Catholic population centers such as Cleveland and Boston struggle under the burden of too few Catholics to provide financially for their maintenance or to keep them vibrant communities of faith, Catholics in Southern cities such as Atlanta and Fort Worth, Texas, are lobbying their bishops for new parishes and schools to accommodate the growth.

In 1987, there were about 19,600 parishes for 54 million Catholics, or about 2,700 Catholics for every parish. By 2011, the number of parishes had been reduced to about 17,800, a net decline of more than 7 percent. Even though most of the parish mergers and closures occurred in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, in areas that have lost Catholic population, there has been no corresponding increase in new parishes in the areas of the country that are experiencing the most growth. Thus, the ratio nationally is now more than 3,600 Catholics per parish. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Hispanically Speaking News

Moderately committed Catholics (90 percent), similar to low-commitment Catholics (89 percent), are more likely than the highly committed (81 percent) to affirm this view, though clearly it is normative across all types of Catholics (see Figure 7). Nevertheless, despite this openness, Catholics still believe in religious truth. Close to two-thirds, 61 percent, agree that Catholicism contains a greater share of truth than other religions do (with 25 percent of these strongly agreeing). Not surprisingly, highly committed Catholics are more likely to affirm this stance, with 87 percent of them, compared to 61 percent of moderately committed Catholics, agreeing that Catholicism contains a greater share of truth than other religions do.

The continuing significance of an institutionalized Catholic spirituality is reinforced by the finding that 40 percent of our respondents "strongly agree," and an additional 34 percent "somewhat agree," that "the sacraments of my church are essential to my relationship with God." Although still high, the proportion of Catholics, 74 percent, who in 2011 say that the sacraments are essential to their relationship with God is not quite as high as the 81 percent who said so in 2005. Nevertheless, among highly committed Catholics in 2011, a full 100 percent see the sacraments as essential to their personal relationship with God, and among the moderately committed, 75 percent do so. By contrast, only 30 percent of Catholics with low levels of commitment see the sacraments as essential to their relationship with God (see Figure 7).

The ambiguity attached to religious institutional boundaries seeps into the labels people use when asked to describe themselves. Close to half (47 percent) of our Catholics say they are religious and spiritual, 13 percent say they are religious but not spiritual, 28 percent say they are spiritual but not religious, and 11 percent say they are neither religious nor spiritual (see Figure 9). We have not asked this question in previous Catholic surveys but we can compare our findings with those from a survey conducted by the General Social Survey in 2008 using a representative sample of Americans, not just Catholics. In that survey, 74 percent of Catholics said either they were religious and spiritual (40 percent) or religious but not spiritual (34 percent) — compared to the 60 percent in our 2011 survey who chose either of these religious designations. By contrast, 20 percent of Catholics in the 2008. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: dipity.com

The percentage of Catholics who are highly committed to the church has declined -­­ from 27 to 19 percent — in the 25 years since we first began tracking American Catholics' levels of commitment. Nonetheless, there is a relative stability in the commitment patterns over time. In 2005, for example, 21 percent of the respondents were classified as highly committed Catholics, and this figure was 23 percent in both the 1993 and 1999 surveys. Further, the percentage of Catholics with a low level of commitment has not increased over the past 25 years; in fact it has slightly declined over time. The relative stability in Catholic commitment is all the more noteworthy given that since the late 1990s, there has been a sharp decline both in the proportion of Americans who identify with a religious denomination and in the proportion who report weekly church attendance. In sum, while significant numbers of Catholics may leave the church (Pew Forum 2008), the snapshot of current Catholics that our surveys capture at any one point in time (e.g., 1987, 1993, 1999, 2005), suggests that despite Catholic fluidity (due to people leaving, the aging of current cohorts, the influx of new immigrants), the level of commitment of those who are Catholic at a given time is not dramatically changing. And yet we certainly live in a changing church and in a changing society where religion is losing some of its supreme salience. Read more

• Source: National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Fr Z's Blog