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Where the Triune God brings unity, Satan seeks to sow division.

Few truths better explain the ongoing debates and, yes, hostilities within the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

From the indissolubility of marriage to immigration, there are many reasons we are divided—many symptoms to the disease of sin. One of these issues is, of course, environmental protection—which is all I’ll focus on here.

Last Friday, His Excellency, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego gave an impassioned speech at a United States gathering of the World Meeting of Popular Movements. Brian Roewe of the National Catholic Reporter provides his usual in-depth coverage of the event and the talk by Bishop McElroy.

The speech was on a variety of topics—mostly a repudiation of the policies of President Trump, including on the environment. His fiery words fired up many of the faithful and infuriated many others. As it is so often, the real story seems to be found in the comments section—that dreaded online netherworld of hostilities and anonymity that bleeds with the modern-day fractures and wounds of the Body of Christ. In Roewe's story, the comments ran from the vilification of the bishop to his pending beatification.

Also...

Last month I posted on the Laudato Si’ International Institute for the Care of Creation in Granada, Spain, founded by Archbishop Javier Martínez. I promised more news and insights about the Institute, and here it is, thanks to a special interview offered by Michael Dominic Taylor, who serves the organization as its General Secretary.

Catholic Ecology: It seems to me that many responses to the Church’s teachings on ecology—most especially in Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’—focus on employing and/or engaging worldly systems of power (in the public square or on public streets) to bring about policy changes in governments and in the board room. Is the Institute approaching things differently? And if so, how?

Michael Dominic Taylor: Laudato Si’ is, first and foremost, a social encyclical in the line of Rerum Novarum and Pacem in Terris. Pope Francis, like Saint Pope John XXIII before him, who addressed his encyclical “to all men and women of good will,” addressed Laudato Si’ “to all people” (LS, 3). While perhaps to our human perception issues such as imminent nuclear war in the times of Pacem in Terris and the current ecological...