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Video: Rose Berger on Christians Against Keystone XL
As we celebrate the final defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, I’ll repost some of the spiritual power that led to this day.
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[Originally published Feb. 8, 2014]
After the State Department released its newest report on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline last Friday, I joined one of the more than 270 protest demonstrations around the country on the following Monday.
In D.C. those of us trying to protect the U.S. from the dangers of the pipeline met in front of the White House to remind President Obama that dirty fuels are not in the American interest.
I was surprised to be approached by Eddie Becker for an interview. He’ makes what he calls “instant documentaries,” mostly for his own entertainment and education. He’s got a number of interesting short interviews on You Tube.
Religious Activist Protests XL Pipeline
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Rose Berger: What I Did On My Summer Vacation
As we celebrate the final defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, I’ll repost some of the spiritual power that led to this day.
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[Originally published Oct. 9. 2013]
Photo by Jay Mullin. Used with permission. I had fun this summer with a great group of folks who came to be known as the ERM 54 (explanation below). After getting arrested, three court appearances, peeing in a cup, negotiating the D.C. community court system, and promising not to get arrested again before Valentine’s Day, I’m ready for the autumn to begin. But that’s not to say that the summer wasn’t fun!
Here’s an excerpt from my most recent column in Sojourners:
OFFICER MARIO normally worked for Homeland Security. On this Friday night he’d been seconded to the Washington, D.C. Metro police, who had their hands full. Not only did they have the usual “drunk and disorderlies,” but now 54 people who looked like card-carrying members of the AARP were filling up their holding cells. Officer Mario, of retirement age himself, was feeling fortunate. He’d been assigned to the women’s side.
“Ladies, ladies, ladies!” Mario said, sauntering in with a mischievous smile. “This must be my lucky night.”
The evening before, we’d all been at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church running role plays on how to “flash mob” the corporate headquarters of Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the firm hired by the U.S. State Department to provide an environmental impact statement on the Keystone XL pipeline. To the disbelief and concern of climate scientists, ERM claimed that TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline would not significantly contribute to climate change. ERM was suspected of “misleading disclosures” regarding conflict of interest and material gain from the pipeline’s completion.
Our white-haired mob of mostly grandparents converged on ERM headquarters at noon to shine a light on such shady dealings. While six silver foxes blocked the elevators by chaining their arms together inside a PVC pipe, I watched two D.C. police lift Steve, age 70, and toss him into the crowd behind me. I knew this nonviolent civil disobedience wasn’t going as planned.
For the next hour the police threatened us with felony charges, and we chanted complicated ditties on Big Oil, Mother Earth, and the merits of transparency in a democracy. Then they slipped plastic cuffs over our wrists and charged us with “unlawful entry.” …
Read the whole essay here (Sojourners, November 2013, “Unlawful Entry”).
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Video: Prayer Circle in front of John Kerry’s House Against KXL Pipeline
As we celebrate the final defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, I’ll repost some of the spiritual power that led to this day.
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[Originally posted April 28, 2014.]
Chief Rueben George, Sundance Chief and Member of the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation in northern Vancouver, BC, speaks at a Prayer Ceremony and Round Dance in front of Secretary John Kerry’s house on April 25th, 2014, in Washington, D.C.
I led the “Catholic prayer” and am in the background in the purple shirt. Ponka leader Casey Camp is also shown, as well as #PrayNoKXL member Brian Webb, and Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb.
This video was produced by Idle No More, which stands in solidarity with the mass mobilization Reject and Protect happening in Washington, Deceit, as well as the Moccasins on the Ground blockade training in Red Shirt, South Dakota, and the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe Spiritual Encampment in Green Grass, South Dakota, and recognizes the words of Protect the Sacred spokesperson, Faith Spotted Eagle, “These three encampments represent the physical, spiritual, and political manifestations of our movement.”
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Cowboys, Indians, and Christians Against the Keystone XL
Members of the Reject & Protect witness set up a tipi on the National Mall. Photo courtesy Rose Berger. As we celebrate the final defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline, I’ll repost some of the spiritual power that led to this day.
[Originally posted April 22, 2014]
Thanks to Liz Schmitt over at Sojourners for the shout out on my involvement at the Reject and Protect event:
“This week, we finally had some good news in the fight against climate change: President Barack Obama announced a further delay in the review process for the Keystone XL pipeline. The right thing to do is to reject the pipeline once and for all, but we all know politics is never that simple. The president says no decision will be made until the end of the year, which means the deadline comes after this year’s election. But the president isn’t up for re-election again, and protecting the environment should not be a partisan issue. All of us have a stake here.
We need more time, President Obama says, more reviews, more answers. But for Sojourners’ Rose Berger, who has been a leader in the faith community’s witness against Keystone XL, the answer has been clear for a long time.
“The Keystone XL pipeline has been morally problematic since its inception. People of faith raised the warning early that this pipeline was an affront to God’s creation and would endanger the poor. It really is the gateway to climate hell.
As Easter people, we know we are on God’s side. We stand with the New Creation — and it does not include the Keystone XL pipeline.
President Obama needs to deny the pipeline permit now. This is no time for playing politics. We need him to step up his leadership in combating climate change. He needs to be much bolder than he has been so far. As Christians, we have the long view and we know President Obama wants to have that view also.” Read the rest here.
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James Alison: Love in a Changing Catholic Climate
James Alison, priest and theologian, has written a great analysis of the final documents from the Synod on the Family vis a vis gay, lesbian, and transgendered Catholics. Alison takes the bishops’ lack of commenting as a good sign, because they clearly thought about the issue a lot during the synod.One telling example of that his conversation was occuring was when New Ways Ministry director Francis DeBernardo asked Ghana’s Archbishop Palmer-Buckle whether the African bishops, or any bishops, would support a statement from the synod condemning the criminalization of lesbian and gay people. Palmer-Buckle’s answer included, “We know that all are sons and daughters of God and have dignity. We are doing what we can. It takes time for individual voices like that to be heard, when you are dealing especially with something that is culturally difficult for people to understand.”
In addition, Bishop Johan Bonny of Antwerp said, “It is better that the synod said nothing on this issue than if they said something harmful.”
So I commend to you James Alison’s generous analysis in The Tablet. Here’s an excerpt below:
There were two weak-minded “ways out” of the current hierarchical impasse in the Church on matters gay – the first, a bombastic reaffirmation of current teaching as obviously right, the solution of the deluded pure; the second, that the teaching is right, but that there is a problem with the language in which it is communicated – the solution of the cowardly cosmeticians. I’m delighted to say we got neither. The low-key reaffirmations of loyalty to current positions in the final document have “pro tem” written all over them; and the general dropping from view of matters LGBT towards the end of the synod suggests that something much more interesting may have happened.
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All Souls Mass at St. Camillus
The altar at St. Camillus was filled with the photos of loved ones for the Feast of All Souls. It was particularly moving to celebrate this day in a community of immigrants, refugees, and sojourners. So often our dead are buried in a land far away with no one to care for their graves or call their names. On Monday night, the community called the names of those around the world whom we have loved, lost, and through Christ found again.
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Joan Chittister: The Feast of All Souls
“All across the world, plants and flowers, trees and flags, mementoes and framed photographs stand on quiet graves to mark that communion of life that one generation feels with another. Our souls stretch always forward, yes, but our hearts stretch always back. The chain of life never breaks, the shape of soul never strains beyond what formed us, what filled us with life in the first place.
We are bound to one another, each generation a link in the chain, each generation a standard for one to come. The people over whose graves we weep are not simply people we have known or who, though strangers, have had the decency to disappear from an earth already overcrowded. No, we cry tears of loss only for those whose lives touched our own and made them better. We cry both for parents and for politicians, for friends and for public figures, for anyone who has lived out “the communion of saints,” the Eucharist of humankind, the Christening of life and made it real in our own time, in our own neighborhoods, in our own world. We weep for those whose faith has formed our own.
When we visit the graves and say the memorial prayers and tell the family stories over the bodies of the dead, we tell of the Christ we saw in them. We remember how it looked in them. We know in them what it is like to be driven by the consuming power of God, to be totally oriented toward God. The communion of saints stands before us, stark witness to the holiness of God, reminding us always to leave behind us for those yet to come a searing memory of the same.”–Joan Chittister, OSB
An excerpt from In Search of Belief by Joan Chittister
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Dan Delany’s ‘Wild, Prophetic, and Holy’ Life
Chris & Dan Delany founded Loaves & Fishes in Sacramento. Dan Delany: May perpetual light surround him. What a giant of a man! I like thinking of all the faces lining up to greet him — all the people that he helped along his Way. Dan died last week, released at last into God’s pure passion.
Catholic Workers’ Dan and Chris are part of my pantheon of spiritual heroes. Not only for their dedication to becoming living epistles of Matthew 25, but in their personal lives and struggles.
Dorothy Day mentioned Dan in at least one “On Pilgrimage” column (The Catholic Worker, January 1972, 1, 2, 4) saying:
… since Jan Adams mentioned in her article all those social alternatives that mean working from the bottom up and with people as they are, rather than from the top down (government), I’d like to write about the “earthy spirituality that Christians need to recover,” that Rosemary refers to. In a way, “Christians” is not quite the right word. The Jews in the tales of the Hasidim show themselves to be masters of that “earthy spirituality.” There is certainly more than a touch of the “wild, prophetic and the holy” in movements like Cesar Chavez’. It is “alive” in the sense that Jesus Christ meant when He said He has come “to bring life and to bring it more abundantly.”
I am sure that it is in the Catholic Worker movement too, and I sensed it in the new houses of hospitality, in San Francisco, run by Chris Montesano, and the one in Los Angeles, run by Dan Delaney, Jeff Dietrich, Sue Pollack (whose article appears in this issue) and several other young men. It is the only thing which keeps me from falling into a state of despair when I see the apparent hopelessness of the destitution situation around us here in New York.
Obituary: Dan Delany co-founded Loaves & Fishes, fought for the poor
He was a Los Angeles priest who fell in love with a nun. Together, they left the Catholic Church, got married, moved to Sacramento and soon began helping the needy in their new hometown by making sandwiches and handing them out from the back of their van.
The need grew and so did the work to address it. Soon the van was not enough and the couple opened Loaves & Fishes. That was 37 years ago.
On Wednesday, Dan Delany, a towering figure in the local plight of the homeless and the battle against injustice, succumbed to a lengthy bout with dementia. He was 80. He is survived by his wife and co-founder of Loaves & Fishes, Chris Delany; their two adult children, Becky and John Delany; and three grandchildren.
Renowned as a storyteller and a wit, Mr. Delany could also be a fierce and persistent voice for the poor. And in many ways, he and his wife lived like those they served, taking only a small salary and never wavering from their vows of poverty they made through the church.
Loaves & Fishes began as a modest soup kitchen and expanded through the years to become a broad-based campus with a private school for homeless children, a shelter for chronically homeless and mentally ill women, a kennel for pets belonging to the poor and a kitchen that continues to serve meals to thousands on every day but Christmas.
Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article41399673.html#storylink=cpy
Read more here: http://lacatholicworker.org/2015/10/23/lacw-co-founder-dan-delany-joins-heavenly-cloud-of-witnesses
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Oscar Rodriguez: Romero and Pope Francis
[Romero’s] prophetic message was that our duty as Christians is to bring the values of the Gospel to life. We have to put our principles into practice, he said. After 30 years from his death and after his recent beatification, Romero’s life and murder is a challenge to us, a challenge to all believers. And I would ask whether we are prepared to actually put that power, the one that comes from following the Lord’s way of life, at the service of others? And to fight for justice for the world’s poor and marginalised, whatever the cost is for our Church? In this particular time that we live in, it is so important to understand and follow what he once said.
Romero on 27th November 1977 said: ‘The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred, it is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to turn weapons into sickles for work.’ A couple of months before, on September 25th 1977, he said ‘Let us not tire of preaching love. It is the force that will overcome the world. Let us not tire of preaching love, though we see waves of violence at sea drowning the fire of Christian love, love must win out, it is the only thing that can.’
… Archbishop Romero and Pope Francis seem to follow parallel spiritual and pastoral tracks. Both men share an understanding of the practical implications of seeking God in all things. A sense of openness to
the presence of God in history and the world, including in struggle and discourse. For many of his biographers, Romero’s favourite subject coming from the Gospel was the incarnation of Our Lord. Christ is the Word that became flesh in history and continues doing that. And since that real faith leads to engagement, then some want to keep the gospel so disembodied that it doesn’t get involved at all in the world, it is safe. Christ is now in history, Christ is in the womb of the people, Christ is now bringing about the new heaven and the new earth, Romero wrote.And if we believe truly in the incarnation of the Word of God, we have to make ours the real and true option for the poor.– Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga,SDB, of Honduras at the 2015 Oscar Romero lecture.
Read From Romero to Francis: The Joy & the Tensions of Becoming a Poor Church with the Poor by Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga (October 2015)
Read more about the 2015 Annual Archbishop Romero Lecture organised by the Archbishop Romero Trust.
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Poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner: Art v. Climate Tyranny
Twenty-six year old poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, from the Marshall Islands, addressed the Opening Ceremony of the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit last year. She performed this video poem entitled “Dear Matafele Peinem,” written to her daughter. The poem received a standing ovation. Kathy is also a teacher, journalist and founder of the environmental NGO, Jo-jikum.
Art is the only thing that can stand in the way of tyranny.
Twelve Pacific Climate Warriors walked from Assisi to Rome last week and are praying in St. Peter’s Square. The Peoples’ Pilgrimage will then continue their walk to Paris in time for the UN climate talks.
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Rose Marie Berger 