He underscored how interconnected every living thing is across the planet, how we all shared a “common home.”
BY EMMET FARRELL
NOV. 12, 2021 5 PM PT
Father Farrell is a retired priest at the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, where he directs the Creation Care Ministry. He lives in Paradise Hills.
I have been a Catholic priest for 56 years. I have served in distinct places, including Iowa, where I grew up in a farm town of 3,000, in a primitive community in Peru’s mountains, and, for the last 27 years, across the San Diego region.
What I experienced and learned working in those places informs my service today, leading the San Diego Diocese’s efforts to protect the environment and the life it sustains. That work is based on the landmark letter Pope Francis released in 2015 to believers and non-believers alike called “Laudato Si’: On Care of Our Common Home.” A distinguished scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, called it “without exaggeration ... the best document ever published on climate change.”
