November 5, 2025

By Darcy Fargo
Editor

“We advocate for Gospel justice and for the care of our dear neighbors and creation.”

That’s how Sister Bethany Fitzgerald, a Sister of St. Joseph, described the community’s Sisters of St. Joseph Social Justice Committee and the work that committee has been doing for over 15 years.

The committee is one of the many ways the sisters live out their vocations and their community’s charism.

“Gospel justice is based on the principles of the six Catholic social justice teachings,” Sister Bethany said. “Of course, Pope Francis added the seventh social justice teaching – care for our common home. It’s all based on and rooted in the Gospels. The challenge to justice has never changed, even though the situations in which we are called to work for that justice have changed over the years.”

Sister Bethany said the committee’s work has two major components.

“Love has two feet,” she said. “One is expressed in care for the neighbor – direct care, helping in ways like feeding the hungry. The second foot is looking at what’s causing the concerns and the situations that are creating this need and advocating for change. As an example: you’re sitting down by a riverbank or body of water, lounging in your Adirondack chair, and you see there’s something in the water. You get up, and you move closer to the edge of the water, and you look, and it’s a baby! You go down into the water, and you go get the baby. You make sure the baby is ok and dry and safe, and you call 911. That’s the immediate response of love, the direct care – taking care of the baby. Then, you’re looking around, and you realize there are more babies floating down the river. That’s when you say, ‘where are these babies coming from? We need to figure this out and make sure we don’t have more babies floating down the river. That’s the justice question. As Catholics, we’re very good at that immediate response, that direct care. I think we could spend more time asking what structures are creating the need and advocating for change. That’s social justice and advocacy.”

How we vote as Catholics is included in that advocacy.

“When we look at social justice, it’s not viewed through a political lens,” said Sister Bethany. “We view it through the lens of the Gospel and Gospel justice, based on the seven Catholic social justice teachings. Personally, I support the candidate I think is best living out the Gospel and the call for justice, and I don’t care about their political party. I look at how they respond to the cries of the poor and the cries of the earth – and the two are the same.”

Sister Bethany said the Sisters of St. Joseph Social Justice Committee’s areas of focus are determined by the community.

“As community, the Sisters of St. Joseph gather every four years and we set the direction based on what we see as needs, the concerns we see as a community,” she said. “That gives direction to the committee, which is made up of sisters, lay associates and others. The committee looks at the broader concerns, and we try to determine what actions we can do.”

Human trafficking has been one of the committee’s causes in recent years.

“We work a lot on education,” Sister Bethany said. “We’ve been getting people together to learn about trafficking and learn how to prevent it. The hope is that they’ll be inspired by these discussions and create opportunities for similar discussions in their communities.”

Faith and ecology also fall under the social justice committee’s umbrella.

“We’ve been working on water,” Sister Bethany said. “That’s something the sisters asked us to work on several years ago. And we do a lot of work on single-use plastics. They get into the water, and it affects the water and all the species in the water and drinking the water – so they affect everything. We’ve been working with the schools and religious education programs to collect plastics that are typically not recyclable to make into railings and decking. Last year, Augustinian Academy students collected over 1,000 pounds of plastics, and they’re getting a bench as a result. They’ve already collected 500 pounds more towards another bench.”

The Faith and Ecology groups have also been working to promote ecology at schools through the Green Apple Award program, a program that highlights the work being done by students to care for God’s creation.

The Sisters of St. Joseph also committed to a Laudato Si Action Plan, a plan to address seven areas within that encyclical of Pope Francis, to be completed within seven years.

Ecology and social justice are intertwined, Sister Bethany noted.

“Care for creation, racism and immigration are all related,” she said. “That’s something we’ve been working on along with sisters from around the country and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. Meetings we’ve had at both the state and federal level include talk of the interconnectedness between those things. If you look at human trafficking, for example, refugees and immigrants, many displaced because of the effects of climate change, are among the most vulnerable.”

Along with that leadership conference, the local Sisters of St. Joseph, joined by members of the lay associates and faith and ecology committees, participated in Bread for the World’s “Offerings of Letters,” a campaign to write letters to legislative representatives about issues related to hunger.

The Sisters of St. Joseph Social Justice Committee has also been working to establish relationships with local state and federal representatives.

“We want to have established relationships with them, so we can encourage them to protect individuals and the earth,” said Sister Bethany. “And we want to affirm them when they are doing that.”

One of the Sisters of St. Joseph Social Justice Committee’s key jobs, though, is discernment.

“Trying to decide what little things we can do to address such huge needs can be very challenging,” said Sister Bethany. “We can’t do everything, but we need to do something. There’s a lot of discernment involved in that. We just want to do what God is asking us to do.”