By Liam Michael Quinn, Congregational Communications Manager, Generalate, Rome

On the Feast of Blessed Aguchita, the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd launches the Global Green Lung Initiative. It is fitting that this journey begins as we celebrate a woman who recognized God’s presence in creation and whose care for the Earth was inseparable from her care for people.

Long before the phrase “integral ecology” became familiar, Aguchita practiced it in ordinary, practical ways. Raised in the Peruvian countryside, she loved plants and animals and saw each plant as a manifestation of God. In La Florida, she shared that reverence with women and girls. She taught them to plant and tend vegetables, use cuttings to grow new plants, and care for animals. She transformed discarded cans into painted planters for tomatoes, spinach, and other food. These small acts supported self-reliance, restored beauty, and helped people recognize what they could create together. “A house with no plants has no life,” she often told the women.

At the sisters’ nursing home in Itaugua, Paraguay, Congregational Leaders Sr. Joan Marie Lopez and Sr. Erika Sanchez  planted an olive tree in the presence of Sr. Margarita Achar, Province Leader of Brazil-Paraguay (main picture). In a home where older sisters are cared for, the young tree links gratitude for lives already given in mission with responsibility for those who will follow.

At the Motherhouse grounds in Angers, around 100 sisters, partners-in-mission, and guests gathered near the labyrinth for a symbolic tree-planting ceremony attended by three members of the Congregational Leadership Team—Sr Josita Corera, Sr Marie Françoise Mestry, and Sr Yolanda Sánchez—as well as Sr Marie Luc Bailly, Provincial Leader of BFMN, and participants in a two-day spirituality gathering organized by the Province. Fr Jean-Michel Amouriaux, Superior General of the Eudists, blessed the trees. Together with the earlier planting in the Generalate gardens in Rome, these actions connect places central to the Congregation’s life in one shared commitment to care for our common home.

In Baguio City, the Philippines, Good Shepherd sisters, staff, student workers, and Franciscan and Benedictine sisters marked the launch of the Global Green Lung Initiative during the Season of Creation with a liturgy reflecting on living water as a source of life, hope, and renewal. Afterward, they planted 100 pine seedlings donated by the Office of the Mayor beside the Vermi House, turning their prayer into a concrete commitment to care for creation.

In Angola, sisters and candidates planted a tree and created a sacred space filled with potted plants in the formation house chapel. During Mass—singing with St. Francis of Assisi, “Praised be You, my Lord,”—each person brought forward a plant as a sign of our interconnectedness with creation and the call, inspired by St. Mary Euphrasia, to cultivate the garden of the soul so that it may bear abundant fruit.

Sisters from the Brussels community and several friends planted a tree together. For Ms. C, who now lives in exile after experiencing war, the act recalled the times when she had to cut branches for fuel simply to survive the cold. Placing new life into the earth with her own hands became a deeply personal act of giving back to the earth what belongs to it: “I feel reconciled with creation. This tree has become a sign of hope, peace, and forgiveness for me. I am reconciled with the Earth.” The group then watered and blessed the tree together.

In Salvador, Brasil, children and adolescents from the BOMPAJUM Project prepared the ground and planted a sapling at Colégio Bom Pastor on September 26. Accompanied by project staff and members of the school community, they learned through direct participation how planting, watering, and caring for a tree contribute to protecting their environment. The tree will remain at the school, allowing the children and adolescents to follow its growth and continue the learning begun that morning.

But we are not beginning from zero. Across the Congregation, sisters, partners-in-mission, program participants, communities, and ministries are already planting trees, cultivating gardens, reducing waste, using renewable energy, protecting land and water, educating others and advocating for climate justice.

In Egypt and Sudan, solar-energy systems have been installed in approximately four schools in Egypt, introduced gradually according to each school’s needs and resources. Communities and schools are also cultivating plants and vegetables, with students—particularly girls—taking part in caring for them and gaining practical experience of food growing, land stewardship, and renewable energy.

At Hogar Santa María Eufrasia in Puerto Rico, shade trees grow alongside mango, avocado, orange, soursop, papaya, blueberry, plantain, and coconut crops. The harvest provides food for the sisters, young mothers, and their babies, while staff maintain the trees and the young women help gather the produce—sometimes accompanied by their children—and learn how to cultivate and protect the home’s green spaces.

In Kolwezi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, a mining region marked by extraction, students, staff, community members, sisters, and partners-in-mission came together to learn about global warming and ecological briquettes as an alternative to charcoal. They then planted 156 trees. Their action joined education, restoration, and practical alternatives while giving young people a direct role in caring for their future.

In Cà Mau, Vietnam, more than 65 rural women who had been supported through livelihood and microcredit programs explored the links between water, waste, sanitation, family health, and the condition of local rivers and canals. The learning became personal: participants identified changes they could make at home, including a commitment to stop throwing waste into nearby waterways. Economic empowerment and environmental responsibility were treated not as competing priorities, but as parts of the same path toward healthy families and communities.

In Angola, the Kyma Kyetu project brings sustainable agriculture together with food security, economic opportunity, and social reintegration. Around 144 women and young people are growing food, learning ways to protect the soil, preserving produce to reduce loss, and turning agricultural waste into organic fertilizer. The project also reveals how local action can be strengthened by global solidarity: sisters in Münster, Germany, raised funds for a truck to help move produce and supplies. One community’s hands are joined with another’s across borders.

In the gardens of the Provincial House in Sri Lanka, sisters gathered to plant several trees, while in Nayakakanda sisters and program participants of their income generating project held a ‘Green Day’ to gather and plant trees which will bear fruit for those in need.

In St. Clair, Pennsylvania, care for our common home took the form of public advocacy. When land connected with the Congregation was proposed for use in a landfill expansion, the regional team stood alongside residents who feared the environmental and community consequences. A small ownership interest became an opportunity to support local voices in court. This response reminds us that integral ecology asks more than personal lifestyle changes; it also requires us to examine power, land use, public decisions, and who carries the cost of environmental harm.

From Paraguay and Angers to Kolwezi, Cà Mau, Angola, and St. Clair, these responses differ in scale and setting, yet each expresses the same conviction: reconciliation must include our relationships with one another and with all creation. They show that the Global Green Lung Initiative does not begin from zero; it connects and strengthens what is already taking root across the Congregation. Together, they ask each of us: What will we plant, protect, restore, change, or challenge where we are?

On Aguchita’s feast, we honor her best by continuing the pattern of her life: noticing the sacred in what is close at hand, sharing practical knowledge, standing with communities under pressure, and cultivating hope even in places marked by violence or loss.

Discover the Global Green Lung Initiative and learn how to take part in this shared journey. Then help us make the response visible. Send us your stories, photos, and short videos—whether your action involves planting, restoring land, reducing waste, changing energy use, educating a community, or advocating for environmental justice. By sharing what is taking root in each place, we can encourage one another and raise one global Good Shepherd voice for the dignity of people and the integrity of our common home.