Catherine's Cafe Vocation Blog

  “Purchasing is always a moral and not simply economic act.”   Pope Francis.  Laudato Sí.  Paragraph 206   We are in the last week of the Season of Creation (September 1 - October 4).  Pope Francis has issued a message for this time.  In it he writes: “The disintegration of biodiversity, spiraling climate disasters, and unjust impact of the current pandemic on the poor and vulnerable: all these are a wakeup call in the face of our rampant greed and consumption.”     With the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, grocery shelves went empty of toilet paper and other basic necessities.   While some stockpiled, others were left without.  This is clearly an injustice.     As religious we are not exempt from falling prey to the culture of greed and consumption.  The temptation is real, to hoard.  Becoming a religious does not take away this temptation but in the company of o...

Over the last months, my prayers have included in a particular way people in cities and towns along the might, muddy, murky Mississippi River - and especially for residents of Davenport, Iowa, my hometown, which has experienced devastating record flooding. Experts fear that while the waters will wane, flooding could continue throughout the summer if rainfall is heavy, both locally and upstream. Businesses will, and are, experiencing losses - physical, financial and emotional. And, as is always the case, here and globally, those who suffer most are the materially poor who do not have the financial or human resources to rebuild and move on. Clearly climate change is part of the problem, with polar ice caps melting at alarming rates under the ever warming blanket of earth’s atmosphere, the product of human activity more than anything else. Yet there is another voice crying out in the midst of this ‘natural disaster’...the voice of the river, whose plaintive cry is, “Where would you hav...