It’s easy being green

Maybe too easy. The Catholic Church in the United States was for too long dominated by an Irish clergy. I would hate to replicate that in the Women’s Ordination Movement. Nonetheless, I am about to be green.

After all, in our East Coast cities and maybe others this weekend, one can’t walk without dodging hordes of pub crawlers in green. That’s not the green I mean to adopt.

Rather, I have been charmed by the SUNRISE MOVEMENT representatives in Philadelphia who spoke to my Positive Aging meeting this week. Emily, all of 20, and Benjamin, similar, explained the “Green New Deal.”

I am going to leave Vatican politics aside for this week, except to note that Pope Francis is ahead of the game with Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home, the encyclical he published in 2015. You owe yourself a read if you haven’t. This Argentinian will move you to green.

Rather, I am going to risk American politics by endorsing Alex Mikulich’s National Catholic Reporter stand as a Catholic Democratic Socialist. I hope I don’t turn too many of you off by admitting this; I am curious about what you think and where you stand.

Mikulich comes to the defense of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as it seems I have been doing since last June. Sometimes I think all the criticism is just ageism, but I really think it’s that few of my non-Catholic friends adopt the radicalism that Catholic Social Teaching inspires.

I capitalize that because I cannot do better than Mikulich does in quoting various popes and theologians about what that teaching is, though I feel as if I have been trying to live it, and vote it, for my entire adult life. That’s the great beneficence of my education at the College of St. Elizabeth, Brown University, and the University of Pennsylvania, oddly enough. With the firm foundation of the St. E’s Young Christian Students’ “Observe-Judge-Act,” I approached the Ivy League’s American Civilization departments and wound up studying the Social Gospel, mostly in American Protestantism, which deepened my understanding of the Catholic theology I had learned at St. E’s.

So I read The Nation as well as lots of Catholic journalism. Mark Hertsgaard writes about the demonstrations that occurred yesterday around the world. “The Climate Kids Are Coming; With a Green New Deal and Student Strikes For Climate, will young people save us yet?”  Just like last year with gun control, Emma Gonzales as Joan of Arc, Greta Thunberg is St. Francis. I love the idea that this generation, high school and college students, believe they can change the world. I want to support them.

And some of them are green, as in real Irish green.  In NCR, Sarah MacDonald characterizes weekly vigils in Dublin as “good-natured and exuberant, but the message is deadly serious: If we fail to change, the world’s climate will be altered with catastrophic consequences for the planet and all of its life.”  MacDonald catalogues the various witnesses across the country and the writers who inspire them, including Mary Robinson, another former President of Ireland. We need an official former Prime Minister here, to be well-known and to speak her truth.

Back to the radical agenda of the Green New Deal. If you missed the Youth Climate Strike yesterday, you can go to the New Deal Town Halls in the US this spring, listed on this site.

This generation around the world is clear about the risk to their lives and their futures if massive policy changes are not implemented to stop climate change and, in this country, to create jobs, which is like our advocating for Women’s Ordination almost fifty years ago now; so far out it will seem impossible and so necessary it will be inevitable. I like being on the green radical fringe, just like the purple, because the fringe gets bigger and bigger as the fabric of objections unravels.