RAOEN’s attention to recent local, regional, and global pastoral letters on the pilgrimage of hope, care for creation and ecological conversion, and climate justice and our common home, reflects its continuing commitment to highlight the vulnerability of the margins and the continuing injustice because of inaction to the climate crisis and disruption where there are climate responses.
The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), May Pag-asa Pa Ba? (Is There Still Hope?) on 2 February, the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) issued To the Local Churches in Asia on the Care of Creation: A Call to Ecological Conversion on 15 March, and the Catholic episcopal conferences and councils of Africa (SECAM), Asia (FABC), Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM) published a document A Call for Climate Justice and the Common Home: Ecological conversion, transformation, and resistance to false solutions on 12 June and presented to Pope Leo XIV on 1 July 2025.
Using these statements and letters in reflections with the youth gives courage to understand that the Church is listening and supporting local communities in their actions.
On the ground, RAOEN participated in local events with indigenous communities expressing faith, hope, and actions in a world where they continue to absorb the destruction. In many parts of the world, very extreme events of floods, fires, and the loss of whole villages at the same time are experienced while the changes in oceanic and glacial processes, sea level rise and pollution are also disturbing.
These injustices are very difficult to accept in the South where the vulnerabilities of people are higher and disasters from more intense and frequent climate extremes affect millions, while in the North the decisions and polices turn against climate responsibilities.
The joys and sufferings of Indigenous Peoples give life to the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, celebrated on 9 August, and the Season of Creation that we enter from 1 September to 4 October.
Stories of indigenous youth across the biome long for a world that listens and acts and enables a meaningful engagement with others on what needs to be done globally, and the need to challenge systems as well for a humanity that respects and includes all of creation.
The commitment of many is in communities and is the generational struggle of Laudato Si’. We are challenged as a synodal Church to listen to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth.
The lived experience of an integral ecology calls for journeying closely with those who suffer. We need to find mutual hope and community that allows the poor and indigenous communities to share the woundedness and life of the land and seas, and so that all from the margins can participate in renewed pastoral planning as a journeying in synodality.