https://www.catholicwomenpreach.org/preaching/09132026
Erin Lothes, Ph.D., is the executive director of Bethan
y Center Hudson Valley, an ecological education center in New York. She is author of Inspired Sustainability: Planting Seeds for Action (Orbis 2016) and The Paradox of Christian Sacrifice:The Loss of Self, The Gift of Self (Herder and Herder, 2007), as well as many articles on faith-based environmentalism and energy ethics and a commentary for the Orbis Books publication of Pope Francis’s Laudate Deum.
Dr. Lothes was a tenured associate professor of theology at St. Elizabeth’s University, until resigning to lead the Laudato Si Animators Program with the Laudato Si Movement. She has been a long-time collaborator and divestment activist with many interfaith environmental coalitions such as GreenFaith, the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, and the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, where she is presently a visiting scholar. She is also an ecclesial affiliate with the Laudato Si Research Institute, Campion Hall at Oxford University
September 13, 2026
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Erin
Lothes
Today’s readings bluntly acknowledge
the pain of anger and our need for forgiveness. But are there times anger is
needed?
Sins and ecological degradation has
been linked by our Popes, bishops, and theologians, perhaps first named by the
Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, but what truly is our own complicity?
Not primarily the small actions of
excess waste, or failed recycling, or use of fossil fuels in driving. We know
that personal small actions matter and create the habit of virtue to do more.
But the reality, as Pope Francis clearly names in Laudato Deum,
is of persistent deception and greenwashing by industry, financial and
governmental leaders.
And in response to this we do need to
stay angry- with the clarity to identify the real sinner: the persistent
structures of unrepentant polluting industries. We are called, through our
commitment to health, to love, to life, to advocate – to raise a voice of anger
against these systems.
Our Church clearly teaches our
obligation to care for our common home through rapid and large scale change.
As Pope Francis declared in Laudato Si,
We know that technology based on the
use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a
lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay. ….
Politics and business have been slow to react in a way commensurate with the
urgency of the challenges facing our world.” (Laudato Si’ 165).
Our response is not simply a political
advocacy response, but a deeply spiritual response to a cultural crisis
engendered by entrenched enemies- and we have to be comfortable with this term,
as was Jesus, who spoke of enemies quite directly. So does Pope Francis, using
the term “assault.” He writes in Laudate Deum:
“the ecological conversion and an
educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate
resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm” characterize our response.
Thus we can seek pardon from the
desperate task of personal environmental purity and the futile (and
antagonizing) moral zealotry of seeking perfect lifestyle sustainability.
Instead, it challenges and empowers climate disciples to be organized just as
intelligently as the polluting industries and to forge our alliances across the
intersectionalities of injustice and enact the new transition. Thus, sent
forth, climate disciples are challenged to speak truth to power and expose the
lie of greenwashing and the shame of the personal carbon footprint invented by
fossil fuel companies to gaslight the modern world.
We see and feel the impacts of the
climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis. We hear the cry of the
earth and the cry of the poor. Yet God has guided God’s family through the
desert before. With the problems of today, as serious and even
frightening as they are, our fundamental faith response is one of trust. We can
turn to God our Creator in trust and pray that the individual ways we may have
failed to care for the earth, but much more the greater industrial polluting
systems we struggle to dismantle, will not have permanently destructive impact
and God will put these transgressions behind us.
The Psalm for today honors God’s
forgiving kindness.
The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to
anger, and rich in compassion.
He pardons all your iniquities,
heals all your ills.
He redeems your life from destruction,
crowns you with kindness and compassion.
Through this fundamental trust, we let
God be Creator, truly “Lord of both the dead and the living” (Romans 14).
