Towards a Green New Deal
A Global Jesuit Vision
As an initiative of the Irish Jesuit Province, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice is part of a global network of initiatives that hope to educate, serve justice, encourage reconciliation, and bring about spiritual growth. We are guided by the Society’s Universal Apostolic Principles, the four cardinal orientations which provide a blueprint for our work for the next decade: Showing the way to God, Walking with the Excluded, Journeying with Youth, and Caring for our Common Home. In particular, we are
inspired by the call to “Care for our Common Home”, which has its basis in Laudato Si’.
Through our collaboration and identification with this genuinely global movement, we offer a distinct vision within Irish environmentalism which resists the sterile and misleading dichotomies that constrain our discourse. The line between spirituality and activism is porous. The secularist impulse that often characterises contemporary Irish political discourse may be explicable in terms of our recent history, but it comes across as inescapably parochial when we look around the world, especially to the Global South, and see how religious commitment, spiritual practice, and a holistic appreciation of all the different ways human beings discover and construct meaning are at play. We are unapologetically presenting a Christian – specifically an Ignatian – vision of environmental and political care, but this is explicitly and intentionally inclusive of those who do not share such convictions. The Jesuit preferences call us “collaborate with Gospel depth, for the protection and renewal of God’s creation” and, as such, we will make common cause with anyone and everyone who shares that vision.
