Brother Paul Kennedy, a member of the Dominican Order, grew up in Cincinnati with a dream of running a restaurant. Today, he is fulfilling that dream in an unexpected way. Every weekday, he is in charge of feeding the physical and spiritual hunger of more than 300 people at the Holy Family Soup Kitchen in Columbus. Brother Paul offers that, “What always was important to me about the restaurant business was the chance to communicate with people as much as the chance to feed them. But regardless of what I did, every job I’ve had in the past was focused on service to people. Here at the soup kitchen, I get the chance to do the kind of work I wanted to while growing up, while at the same time getting to know the people we serve and developing a rapport with them.”
How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy is the subtitle of Joanna Macy’s book Active Hope. The book was the inspiration for the Sisters of Earth gathering that took place July 12-15, 2018 at Mount Saint Joseph, home of the Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cincinnati was chosen as the location partly because of the ancestral inspiration of Sister of Charity Paula Gonzalez, who promoted solar power and sustainability projects and teachings throughout the Catholic world. This year, nearly 100 women from the United States and Canada gathered, in part, to remember Sister Paula and also to address concerns about the ecological/spiritual crises of our times by asking questions such as: Who are we? Where are we? How did we get here and what is possible? And — where do we go from here?
In 2009, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati signed on to the St. Francis Pledge to Care for Creation. Since then, they have started their own Climate Change Task Force. This task force has adopted the mission of committing themselves to work towards a sustainable world based off of the responsibility to Care for God’s Creation. They work to implement the five pillars of the pledge: praying, learning, assessing, acting, and advocating for the environment and the poor.
With the release of Laudato Si’ and the visitation of Pope Francis to the United States, there has been a noticeable increase in the number of both Americans and Catholic Americans who have demonstrated concern over Climate Change. Individuals of various faiths have expressed more trust the Pope due to the overwhelmingly positive reception of his message.
