Cincinnati OH – November 2, 2021 In his Laudato Si Encyclical Letter, Pope Francis challenges the global Catholic Church to vigorously respond to the need to care for God’s creation by addressing the climate crisis. In reply, we, the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, Ohio Province, have fully committed ourselves to support Pope Francis’ challenge through the formation of the Dorothy Stang Initiative for Laudato Si’ Action, a seven-year program wherein we are called to make a healing response to our beloved earth.

“We are choosing to change how we live so that the earth may live,” says the Ohio Provincial, Sister Kathleen Harmon, SNDdeN. “By this public statement, we commit ourselves to being a part of the global effort to bring about change.”

Every religious community has a vision on which it is founded. For the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, the essence of our founding vision is to proclaim the goodness of God. Today this vision calls us to reach out to the call of our earth. “God looked at all he had made, and he found it very good.” (Genesis 1: 31) We resonate with Pope Francis, who through his Encyclical Laudato Si’, calls us to deepen our reverence of and care for creation. We respond to Pope Francis’ call to conversion and join a global planning and action group, the Laudato Si’ Action Platform, a seven year program.  We commit our Province Community to move to an ecology that integrates the cry of impoverished people with the cry of the earth. We do so along with other religious communities and other Catholic groups.

About the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur
The Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur are an international congregation founded in Amiens, France in 1804. In 2015, we celebrated our 175th year in the U.S., and our role in helping to shape the Catholic education system in the United States. Today, more than 1,100 Sisters of Notre Dame serve across the U.S. and in Belgium, Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Great Britain, Haiti, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Peru, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur change lives by making known God’s goodness. Throughout the world, they are committed to education and take a stand with people made poor, especially women and children in the most abandoned places.

For more information about Sister Dorothy Stang, SNDdeN, visit https://www.sndohio.org/sister-dorothy