Catholic Perspectives on Environmental Health
Children's Health and the Environment cont.

• Spearheaded environmental stewardship in health care. Catholic health care is working to educate and build awareness of the importance of promoting environmental stewardship as standard operating procedure within its systems and facilities. This includes encouraging greater environmental responsibility in the medical products purchased by Catholic hospitals and long-term care facilities and reducing medical and other waste. Representatives from ten Catholic healthcare systems have decided to work together to reduce the use of mercury, a substance known to cause developmental problems in children and the unborn. Other Catholic health care systems are being invited to join in this effort.

What’s New
The latest addition to CASE is the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry, with whom we have begun exploring areas of collaboration.

Most recently, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and the Knights of Peter Claver received funding through CASE for education projects: on pesticides targeting farmworkers and ranchers, particularly young adults; and for environmental literacy campaigns among African-American Catholics, with a focus on youth, respectively.

USCCB Position
As Catholics, we are called to participate intimately in sustaining God's creation by caring for our children and their physical environment. Caught in a spiral of poverty and environmental degradation, the poor and the powerless bear a disproportionate burden of the effects of environmental problems, as their lands and neighborhoods are more likely to be polluted, to be near toxic waste dumps, or to suffer from water contamination.

In the face of these challenges, the Catholic community is an integral part of learning more, caring more, and doing more about the environment and the threats to it, and to our children. “For generations, the Catholic community has reached out to children.... We have defended their right to life itself and their right to live with dignity, to realize the bright promise and opportunity of childhood. Now we renew this commitment and build on it. We seek to bring new hope and concrete help to a generation of children at risk.” ("Putting Children and Families First", p. 17)

Resources

• Putting Children and Families First: A Challenge to Our Church, Nation and World
• Renewing the Earth: An Invitation to Reflection and Action on Environment in Light of Catholic Social Teaching
• Make the CASE for Children’s Health: Catholic Coalition for Children and a Safe Environment

For more information on this project, contact Roxana Barillas at 202-541-3445 or rbarillas@usccb.org.