Two leaders of the Together Louisiana movement for social change met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Thursday.
They used a 75-minute meeting to tout the nonprofit’s Community Lighthouse program installing solar panels on churches and other community centers.
“He gave us a big thumbs-up,” Sister Alicia Costa, superior of the Sisters of the Holy Family congregation in New Orleans, said after the meeting.
“Literally,” laughed Together Louisiana organizer Broderick Bagert.
Climate resilience
Costa and Bagert joined 13 other people from affiliated U.S. organizations in a private meeting with Francis, to share examples of how they are equipping families and communities to influence public decisions. It was their second such meeting with the pontiff, after one last year.
Representatives of the other organizations, also members of the West Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation network, concentrated on immigration and housing. For Costa and Bagert, the focus was climate resilience in a region particularly vulnerable to rising seas, temperature extremes, more intense hurricanes and commercial power failures.
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Together Louisiana includes more than 250 civic organizations and religious congregations of various denominations and purports to be one of the largest grassroots organizations in the state. It has completed community lighthouses in New Orleans at Broadmoor Community Church, Bethlehem Lutheran Church, Crescent Care Health Center and Household of Faith Family Worship Church. Four more are under construction, and Bagert said the nonprofit has money to build an additional 17 in the state. The goal is 500.
Costa and Bagert see the initiative as a response to the pope’s 2015 letter to the church's bishops, called the Laudato Si encyclical, which framed climate change as moral issue.
“It’s clearly something that’s on his mind and something that he sees as of the utmost importance,” Bagert said.
Anxiety over climate change itself is often compounded by anxiety over what an individual can do about it. But Bagert found Francis encouraging, and said he told them:
“Your work is atomic. You go atom by atom, little by little, but moving forward. Like water moves forward, which becomes a river and soon pervades everything it touches.”
A special report from The Times-Picayune | The Advocate examines Louisiana's perilous future in a time of rising seas and intensifying storms.
Together Louisiana representatives first met with Francis in 2022. The introduction came via an intermediary who knew Francis when he was archbishop of Buenos Aires before being elected pope in 2013.
They said the 86-year-old pontiff entered Thursday’s meeting unaided except for a walking cane, greeted guests individually and impressed them as unpretentious, down to earth and an attentive listener.
He disarmingly acknowledged divisions in the U.S. church over his priorities, telling them, “Be careful meeting with me. They say I’m a communist,” Bagert recalled.
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“The pope was just so personable,” Costa said. “He’s jolly. He is a comedian at times.”
“Just very engaged, insightful, kind of sharp-witted,” Bagert added.
Costa said she put in a good word for the New Orleans-born founder of her order, the Venerable Henriette Delille (1812-1862), who is two steps shy of sainthood, but the pope didn’t tip his hand on the canonization process.
At the end of the meeting, they said, he blessed his 15 guests, gathered them in a circle as they joined hands with him to recite the Lord’s Prayer.
Pope Francis poses with representatives of Together Louisiana, Together New Orleans and affiliated U.S. organizations after their meeting in Vatican City on Thursday, Sept. 23, 2023.
