United Kingdom: zero emissions, 100 parishes and 200 schools involved in the two-year project of the Catholic Church

A two-year project that will involve over one hundred parishes and over two hundred schools, in the attempt to bring the Catholic Church of England and Wales to remove carbon dioxide emissions in response to Pope Francis’s call to take care of the environment. It has been launched by the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and will be led by John Arnold, the bishop in charge of the diocese of Salford where Manchester is located. The survey, which will cover each one of the twenty-two Catholic dioceses and will then come up with recommendations about how to reduce energy consumption, will also involve the “Laudato Si’ Research Institute” at the University of Oxford and St Mary’s Catholic University in London, as well as the “Tyndall Centre” at the University of Manchester. “We want to commit to a joint action that may provide our Church with the technology and financial strategy required to cope with the environmental crisis”, Roland Daw, one of the people in charge of the project, explained. “Though alarming, the statistics about the rate at which we are destroying the planet failed to change people’s everyday behaviour. Catholic devotees have an important role to play to show their communities how one can become sustainable and create an integral ecology that may also reflect the social dimensions of our lifestyles”.
Valentina Bombelli