SEPTEMBER 2022 I


t’s easy to lose hope these days. Tere is so much in our world that needs renewal and healing—in our personal lives, in the Church, in society, in God’s


creation as a whole. I was recently in conversation with Anna Robertson, then-Director of Youth and Young Adult Mobilization for an organization called Catholic Climate Covenant. (Editor’s note: Anna has since transitioned to a new role as the Associate Director for Distributed Organizing for Discerning Deacons.)


Anna is also a singer-songwriter and guitarist who is passionate about the power of music to effect social change. I was truly inspired to hear Anna’s uplifting take on the challenges we are facing. Read on for a glimpse into her unwavering commitment to make a difference, including ways that we as pastoral musicians can work for change and be the voice of hope in a changing world.


ND: Anna, what led you to become involved with Catholic Climate Covenant?


Anna: I was born in Nashville, Tennessee, a cradle Catholic, and I attended Catholic school my whole life. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Teology with minors in Spanish and Peace Studies from Xavier University in Cincinnati and a Masters in Teological Studies from Boston College School of Teology and Ministry. After graduate school, I spent four and a half years working in campus ministry at Seattle University. One of the formative experiences in my life was a significant period of time that I spent in different parts of Central America getting to know the other side of the U.S. immigrant experience up-close. For three months during my undergraduate studies, I lived in Central America with a family who had relatives in the United States. Learning about the other side of that experience was impactful for me.


I also spent time in an intentional Catholic community in Appalachia called Bethlehem Farm that was one of the main sites of my own “ecological conversion,” to borrow a term that Pope Francis uses in Laudato Si’. Catholic Climate Covenant is a national Catholic organization that works at the intersection of care for the earth and care for the poor. Tat language comes from Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s encyclical on integral ecology, which captures the way that environmental issues intertwine with social issues. Pope Francis says that we can’t separate the “green” from the “social.” Catholic Climate Covenant


tries to mobilize and equip the U.S. Catholic community to respond meaningfully and faithfully to the climate crisis and environmental degradation. In my role as the Director of Youth and Young Adult Mobilization, my charge is to build out a movement of young people in the U.S. Catholic community—to help them step into their protagonism in this moment and be leaders in this work (as so many of them are already doing), and to do that in a way that we can claim as Catholics.


ND: What does your work with Catholic Climate Covenant involve in a typical week?


Anna: We do so much at Catholic Climate Covenant. It looks different week to week. Tis past June, I was in Washington, DC, accompanying a group of students from different colleges and universities in the Sisters of Mercy network. Te team at Sisters of Mercy was hosting the students for an advocacy immersion week focused on climate, so I was able to hang out with a bunch of college students, which I love, and hear about their joys and hopes, their griefs and anxieties. I was also doing advocacy training for them as they prepared for legislative visits as a part of our Encounter for Our Common Home campaign. Recently, Catholic Climate Covenant has been organizing (along with our partner organizations) a national Catholic campaign calling on Catholics to contact their senators and ask them to move on a significant legislative package that would support climate action.


I regularly have one-on-one interactions with different young adults and with people who work with young adults. Since my work is to build out a new program, it’s important that I have conversations with people on the ground and understand the diversity of lived experiences within the young adult sphere in the Catholic world. I’ve also been planning a lot of educational resources to be used in young adult ministry contexts, including developing an integral ecology small-group curriculum that can be used for a series of weeks to provide the tools that people need to engage with this topic. Similarly, I am working with different dioceses to develop and pilot young adult retreats, trying to develop resources that people who work with young adults can use to meet the pastoral needs of their communities, because climate anxiety is a huge weight on many young people’s hearts.


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