As Community Esperanza comes to the end of its first year together in Lisbon, the community is already beginning to harvest the fruits — both literal and spiritual — of this courageous new endeavor. This cross-regional community, made up of sisters from the Region of Europe South and from the soon-to-be-formed new region in northern Europe, has spent its first year discovering how mission, community, and integral ecology can grow together in ordinary places.
Pope Leo XIV, in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, reminds us that humanity today faces a pivotal choice: “either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together” (MH 1). In Laudato Si', Pope Francis similarly writes that we are “There is a nobility in the duty to care for creation through little daily actions, and it is wonderful how education can bring about real changes in lifestyle” (LS 211).
One of the ministries of Community Esperanza offers a concrete example of these teachings through its involvement in three community garden projects on the outskirts of Lisbon. In each place, vacant or fallow pieces of land are transformed into spaces where food can be grown for family or community consumption — and where people can reconnect with the earth, with one another, and with their own sense of dignity.
The first garden is a small plot beside the temporary dwelling of a migrant woman. After her home was destroyed by public services and she was forced to rebuild it, she told one of the sisters, “Sister, for my mental health, I need to create a small garden in this place.” For her, cultivating the soil is not simply about growing food — it is about recovering peace, stability, and a sense of home in a place where both have been taken away.
The second garden is on a piece of municipal land that Roma families have permission to use to grow food — and it is also where the community collaborated on the construction of a chicken coop. The matriarch of an extended Roma family, who lives with a painful medical condition, put it simply: “When the pain is very intense, and I can’t lie down or sit, I come here to the garden, and the chickens help distract me and take my mind off the pain.”
The third project is at a local center for women recovering from drug or alcohol addiction, who asked for help to create a vegetable garden on the unused land around their building. This is also where the sheep are kept, and together the sisters, volunteers, and others helped clear the land and build a bamboo fence, creating a space where the women can grow vegetables and care for animals as part of their recovery from addiction. In addition to learning how to create and tend to a garden, physical activity helps reduce stress and anxiety and supports the building of healthy routines.
In each of these places, working the land has become about far more than food. Clearing ground, planting seeds, building fences, tending chickens and sheep, and waiting for the harvest all carry a deeply human and therapeutic dimension — a way of restoring relationships with the earth, with one another, and with oneself. In a community where basic needs are not always guaranteed, even the simple act of sharing in a WhatsApp group that the vegetables are ready for harvesting becomes a sign of solidarity and celebration.
These gardens have also opened unexpected doors. Their creation across different contexts has enabled new synergies to emerge, involving associations, volunteers, families, local services, and companies. This network allows not only the sharing of material and human resources, but also the exchange of knowledge, the understanding of other cultures, the strengthening of neighborhood relationships, and a growing awareness of what it means, in practice, to care for our common home.
«No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing — just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part” (MH 13). In small gardens on the outskirts of Lisbon, Community Esperanza has witnessed exactly this: each person contributing what they can, whether by clearing land, planting seeds, building fences, tending animals, sharing knowledge, or simply taking pleasure when something begins to grow.
As this first year comes to a close, these gardens offer a powerful image of what ecología integral can look like in practice: land restored, food grown, relationships deepened, pain accompanied, and hope quietly cultivated. “The idea of integral human development finds today a decisive criterion of evaluation in integral ecology, which has become an indispensable dimension of the Social Doctrine of the Church” (MH 84). These gardens are a small but real sign of that vision taking root.
They remind us that mission often begins with small seeds planted in difficult soil — and that, with patience and care, those seeds can bear fruit. Our common destiny compels us to seek a new beginning: “let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life” (LS 207).
