Christ on a bike?

Catholic campaign promotes simple sustainable living

Agonising about Christianity’s attitude to overconsumption is a hardy perennial. Usually it peaks with the laments over the commercialisation of Christmas. More recently the image of Easter – as a festival for chocolate fiends – got a bizarre extra twist, as the Easter bunny’s already unnatural eggs were magnificently misrepresented in a Somerfield press release as a symbol of the birth of Christ.

But this year Roman Catholics have started engaging directly with the challenge of all-consuming consumerism, in an international project called ‘livesimply’. Sponsored by the Cafod aid agency, it enjoins Catholics to look hard at their lifestyles and choose “to live simply, sustainably and in solidarity with the poor”. It even quotes St Ambrose’s stern warning, that to do anything else is “stealing from the poor.”

Liam Hayes of Cafod described the launch of ‘livesimply’ in Nairobi in January as “an encounter… a meeting of people seeking a dialogue about living simply as a foundation for another possible world”. Its theme, that ‘I am somebody and I can do something’, drew strength from the collective potential of the world’s one billion Catholics to make a huge difference. For novelist Helen Olajumeke Oyeyemi, “out in Kenya it became clearer to me than ever that minimising energy wasting and the emission of harmful gases would really be doing God’s work… It’s like each individual waste of energy elsewhere is gathering into an environmentally jaw-breaking slap that is yearly delivered to the African continent.”

In everyday life in Britain the ‘livesimply’ message, backed up by a programme of campaign-related events, translates into such specific suggestions as cutting car use, using sustainable energy sources, buying local, seasonal organic and fair trade produce and ensuring that clothes and furniture are bought from fairly traded sources. A Promise forum on the campaign website makes it easy for people to make a public promise. These generally take the form “I will… [eg ‘Refuse, Re-use or Recycle all plastic carrier bags’] but I want 30 other people to join me,” and the website shows the running tally of others who have joined that commitment. – Fiona Campbell

*An ecumenical green initiative among London’s Christian leaders has come up with advice on how every church can contribute to cutting energy use and combating climate change. The purpose-written new guidebook, For Creed and Creation, is being distributed to over 4,000 churches, with the hope that it will ultimately be adapted to encompass other religions and faiths. Richard Chartres, the bishop of London, stressed at the launch that the science on climate change is clear and it is “no longer possible to find excuses for doing nothing”.

1 May 2007

Fiona Campbell