Once each term, across the Good Samaritan Education schools, people in our community gather online to hold a single question open together: how do we respond, as the community of Good Samaritan Education, to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor? Established in 2025 as part of our formation year on ‘Stewardship’, our ongoing Integral Ecology Learning Community was born.
By Gabrielle Sinclair*
Our purpose statement is the thing I return to whenever I need grounding in the urgency and need to show up, term after term, screen after screen.
As the community of Good Samaritan Education, through the lens of the Good Samaritan Benedictine tradition and Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si’, on care for our common home, with Integral Ecology, we are called to respond to:
- The need for personal and communal conversion;
- The need for an ongoing deepening of our understanding of the spirituality and theology underpinning Integral Ecology;
- The need for transdisciplinary education and ongoing formation;
- The need for networking and collaboration; and
- The need for living an Integral Ecology and including our intentions and practice with the Laudato Si’ Action Platform.
We are not a committee that produces policy, nor a working group reporting up a chain. We are a learning community in the truest Benedictine sense: people choosing, term by term, to be formed together, to bring our questions rather than our answers, and to let that formation flow back out into our own schools and our own days.
Our Good Samaritan Benedictine tradition that recognises Christ in all and lives within a generosity of love and spirit that ensures all things are to be given the reverence as if they were the vessels of the altar, is the stability and safety of this learning community.
This stability is essential on our journey to unlearn practices and ways of being that do not serve our common home and to learn the tools and praxis of Integral Ecology through dialogue, community and conversion.
Our learning community is an extraordinary place of hope, buoyed by awe and mystery that renews and restores each of us as we take the next turn, which is the hard work of changing minds and hearts, surfacing our own assumptions and untangling fixed ideas.
Immersed in living water
Our most recent gathering was at the beginning of the Season of Creation, the season kept by Christians the world over from 1 September to the Feast of St Francis on 4 October.
This year’s international theme is ‘Living Water’, drawing from Ezekiel’s vision of a river flowing out from God’s sanctuary, deepening as it goes, until it heals barren land, freshens salt water, and brings life wherever ‘living water’ flows.
Communities across the globe are sitting with that same image this season, under the same invitation, not to observe from the bank, but to become immersed. Our reflections on the theme provided the foundation for the day’s focus.
Noticing the house we live in
Much of our conversation this term returned to a framework Jacqui Remond, our co-convenor, has been walking us through, working with Vanessa Andreotti’s cartography the ‘House of Modernity’, a way of naming the foundations much of modern life is built on, separability from nature, self-interest, the pursuit of accumulation.
We sat with a question about which kind of response we are currently making. Soft reform, small adjustments that leave the house standing much as it is? Radical reform, which asks different questions and invites more voices in? Or something beyond reform altogether, a genuinely different way of being?
“We’re on a path that is built on violence and damaging to people and planet,” Jacqui named plainly.
One of our learners asked the question that has echoed with me since: “What can I do to cultivate the space of imagination that actually takes me to radical or beyond current ways of being, rather than just soft reform?”
This is why we gather to re-ignite our imaginations, to ask new questions and become prepared to make new mistakes rather than repeat the same patterns of thinking and being; it is a slow but necessary revelation.
Power, love and justice, held together
For me, the thread that tied the whole session together was the relationship between power, love and justice; three things Jacqui has taught this community never to pull apart.
Quoting Martin Luther King Jr, she offered: “power without love is reckless and abusive, love without power is sentimental and anaemic, and power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice”.
We spoke of reframing power itself, not as domination but as agency. If we thought about it as agency rather than power that dominates, I think that shifts the lens for all of us.
A word about Jacqui Remond
I want to name something our community is quietly, or not so quietly, proud of. On 18 August this year, Pope Leo XIV appointed Jacqui, our co-convenor and a co-founder of the global Laudato Si’ Movement, as one of 12 new consultors to the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the only Australian among them.
It is a five-year appointment, recognising decades of her ministry and work with Pope Francis and more recently Pope Leo, including her role with the Dicastery from 2020 jointly coordinating the Ecology Taskforce during the Vatican COVID-19 Commission. Those of us who journey with Jacqui already know the depth of that commitment, knowledge and love.
*Gabrielle Sinclair is the Director of Formation and Mission Integration for Good Samaritan Education.
This article was published in the September 2026 edition of The Good Oil.
