On the eve of COP28, the United Nations’ climate conference in Dubai, San Diego’s Roman Catholic leader issued a statement backing Pope Francis’ call to end fossil-fuel subsidies.
Cardinal Robert McElroy didn’t attend the two-week meeting that ended last week. But he did in spirit — and he walks the walk.
About two years ago, the San Diego diocese serving 1.3 million Catholics began divesting its pension and several trust funds from oil stocks and the like.
And in July 2022, the diocese became perhaps the first in the nation to hire a full-time climate-change fighter.
But when Christina Bagaglio Slentz of Coronado began work as associate director for Creation Care Ministry under the diocesan Office for Life, Peace and Justice, the naysayers came out of the woodwork.
After California Catholic Daily reposted a local Southern Cross article introducing Slentz, many comments were cutting:
I’m afraid we’ve slipped into madness. This ideology of climatism is the latest great deceit thrust upon us by the bishop of San Diego.
It’s all a bunch of hooey. Sad to see the diocese of San Diego buy into it this way.
This virtue-signaling position is as useless a bureaucratic addition as is a chief diversity officer.
When one offered a “better” headline for the Catholic Daily article — suggesting “Tree-Hugger Climbs to Branch Manager” — another commenter wrote: “I hope she goes out on a limb and it snaps.”
It was several months after the comments were posted that Slentz, 50, finally saw them.
Her reaction?
“It’s probably better if I had not read the comments,” she told Times of San Diego in her Pastoral Center office.
She said she’s never had an entire group echo those sentiments during her rounds of the 96-parish diocese. The scathing online comments “was probably the most I saw of any kind of … group negativity.”
But Slentz, a one-time naval intelligence officer and naval reservist married to a former commander of Naval Base Coronado, is undeterred in her mission.
Advisory Group of 10
With a 10-person advisory group that includes the Rev. Emmet Farrell, who previously led the diocese in climate efforts as a volunteer, Slentz preaches the gospel of the Creation Care Action Plan.
McElroy called the 55-page document a “direct response” to the pope’s latest appeal to answer “the cry of the earth in its suffering and the cry of the poor.”
Slentz also takes heart and guidance from the global Laudato Si’ Movement (based on the pope’s milestone 2015 encyclical, a 37,000-word letter on care for the natural environment) and also the Washington-based Catholic Climate Covenant.
So what does she expect local parishes to do?
Whatever they’re up to — from running a community recycling program to fund their garden (St. Thomas More of Oceanside) to seeking environmental justice by opposing polluting trucks (Our Lady of Guadalupe in Logan Heights).
“Every parish is kind of like the different countries [in COP28], right?” says Slentz, who holds a doctorate in global studies with a dissertation titled “Environmentally Related Urbanization and Violence Potential” in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Like nations, she says, local parishes have different capacities and vulnerabilities.
“They respond to these dynamics in their own way and I think a lot of groups are challenged by responding to the climate crisis … because they don’t know where to start or they fear that they have to do all of it,” she says.
She said they also fear monetary expense if they start down that road, thinking “we have to do all of the things.”
Slentz concedes: “Of course, I want everybody to do all of those things. But if we wait until you can do all of it, then we’ll never get there. So I really have tried to push back a little bit on this” belief.
Toward that end, she avoids the former top-down approach and instead invites parishioners and church leaders to workshops — such as ones planned in English and Spanish in late January. She writes a monthly column in the diocesan newspaper.
“Sometimes they were getting stuck, and I think pastors were just very busy, plus COVID,” she says. “You know, it’s just really tough to start a brand new ministry.”
Having been a naval officer and also involved in Coronado’s Climate Action Plan helped Slentz design her ministry — which has already been honored nationally.
“How do you foster leadership? You can’t just say like: Hey, we need leaders, you know, and hope that they’ll show up,” she said.
Thus the workshops about twice a year and her parish pep talks — and nitty gritty advice from the likes of a Franciscan friar who is a restoration botanist, a medical doctor and a career SDG&E employee.
Another adviser, a native Spanish speaker, recently earned her master’s in theology from Franciscan School of Theology at USD.
Creation Care Plan Launched
San Diego church leaders wrote a Creation Care Action Plan in 2019 and finalized it in 2021.
“It’s a great resource for our parishes,” Slentz said. “I say: Hey, take a look at this. These are the things you could do. … This is a no-kidding, we-are-committing-to-doing-this this year.”
The plan aims for annual progress for seven years, “and you can write a paragraph about it,” she said. “You can use an Excel spreadsheet in order to be more specific. … It really does allow for variation.”
But Slentz may only be at work for five years thanks to funding from an anonymous donor — she doesn’t know who — lasting through 2027.
She’s not fazed by the uncertainty.
“I’m a military person,” she said. “So we have courses of action — we call those COAs … like you always have to have your COAs in mind.”
Ideally the local parishes will take off with their own creation-care plans, she says.
“We really want activity to be at the parish level. … Until I was working here, I didn’t really think a lot about the diocesan level. I think most parishioners are probably like that and that’s good, right, like they’re part of their community.”
For now, she has her work cut out — just as the U.N. Conference of Parties was earlier this month.
A Zoom call Dec. 11 hosted by Slentz to discuss COP28 drew only five other people (including this reporter).
They talked about a movie, “The Letter,” a joint product of the Vatican and the Laudato Si Movement. They talked about the relatively meager U.S. pledge of $17.5 million to the Loss and Damage Fund.
Slentz called COP28 “love of neighbor on a global scale.” But she added that Americans are “still not changing our behavior. … We put Band-Aids … on this disease. … Like keeping on smoking while using an inhaler.”
In the same sentence, she used “biodiversity loss” and “eco-spirituality.”
On the Zoom call, Farrell, the retired priest, recalled a fraught moment recently when he was interrupted during a climate-care discussion.
The next day, he told me via email that he had been invited to preach on Laudato Si’ at a local church.
“As I started to speak, a woman off to one side stood and said out loud: ‘What about all the Jews dying in Israel?’ I simply said: Yes, that is a very important issue to be discussed at another time.”
But several people walked out, he said.
“I don’t know their exact motives, because I never got a chance to talk with them,” Farrell said. “My homily was centered on our human role as STEWARDS of creation. I like it when people who question my speaking about Pope Francis’s encyclical stay and talk with me after the service.”
People are uncertain and fearful about world conditions and the future, Farrell said.
“Pope Francis in his letter Laudate Deum singled out the United States as a strong climate change denier and therefore also a strong sentiment of apathy regarding the statements of scientists referring to a climate crisis that calls for a vigorous response.”
In San Diego at least, the call is answered by the divestments — figures weren’t revealed — followed by the hiring of Slentz (who heard about the opening from a fellow Sacred Heart parishioner during coffee-and-donuts time after Mass).
So instead of pursuing a university teaching job, Slentz sought the creation-care gig.
I contacted Catholic Climate Covenant to learn how rare Slentz was as a full-time Catholic-diocese climate warrior.
“Christina is indeed rare (and precious),” wrote Elena Gaona, the group’s director of communications.
She said Slentz is now joined by a full-time staffer in Seattle (Terri Nelson in the Office of the Vicar General Archdiocese of Seattle).
“And the Diocese of Stockton has several staff dedicated to creation care in the form of their Environmental Justice Program through their Catholic Charities,” Gaona said. “Everyone else is part-time or a volunteer blessed by the diocese.”
Kevin Eckery, a spokesman for the San Diego diocese, says McElroy has been consistent in his efforts to combat climate change.
Divestments with No Dips
“I mean we’re half a decade into building solar facilities at many of our parking lots,” Eckery said. “We fulfilled most of the work we need to do for primary divestiture when it comes to energy stocks and we’re working on getting sort of that secondary divestment taken care of.”
Besides pension funds, the diocese has health and cemetery trust funds now divested of oil stocks.
“Our policy on divestment includes secondary sources, too, so we try and avoid investments in companies which in turn invest,” he said, noting such monies are not operating funds.
“We’re fulfilling both our fiduciary responsibility of getting a safe rate of return on these funds as well,” he said.
In a later interview, he observed: “We haven’t had any dips in return. We haven’t had any problems that would say: OK, we zigged when we should have zagged.”
Among divestment targets were certain mutual funds — “sort of the secondary effects of making sure that they had no more than 5% of their stocks” in fossil fuels.
But the diocese beat that 5% goal — cutting ties with funds having at least 3% invested in climate-harming companies.
“At this point, the divestment seems to have taken hold without any troubles,” Eckery said.
But with Catholics generally split 50-50 as Democrats and Republicans, the divestment issue can still raise hackles.
Eckery contends that McElroy and the diocese aren’t adopting a political stance.
“It is a policy stance,” he said. Being wedded to a partisan view of the world “doesn’t mean you can’t embrace policy issues that cross party lines. In fact, you’re almost required to.”
“Catholics are Democrats and Republicans, but there are important values and important issues that transcend politics,” Eckery added.
Creation-care leader Slentz tries to bridge political divides.
“My grandparents came up through the Great Depression, so reusing things was … conserving,” she said, calling such repurposing an example of American ingenuity and innovation at its best.
To depoliticize her climate aims also demystifies them “by saying this is part of our faith that has always been familiar to us.”
She recites church history going back hundreds of years.
Before St. Francis, for example, was St. Hildegard, a German mystic of the 12th century credited with being responsible for recognizing that the fermentation of beer prevents spoiling.
“St. Hildegard has extensive writing on creation,” Slentz said.
And even further back — the Book of Genesis.
“The very first chapters of the the Jewish and Christian scriptural tradition talk about our responsibility to till and keep the soil,” she said.
“The reason that we’re talking about this is because the environmental degradation is related to human life, right? So this is where, you know, we have two great commandments that Jesus gives us: Love God and love your neighbor.
“Who is your neighbor? Jesus’ answer is: Everybody is your neighbor. And now that we live in a globalized world … our neighbor is everybody and our behavior has a capacity to affect everybody.”
Thus when people work to reduce climate risks, Slentz says: “We are loving our neighbors, right?”