This story about a big corporation’s disregard for a well-established religious community’s rights was written and published recently by the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF).
Early on the misty morning of October 1, Williams/Transco workmen clad in neon vests removed the cross. It had been standing sentinel at the apex of a heart-shaped labyrinth, placed in a fifty-foot wide scar across Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The men then heaved the hay bales that had outlined the meditative walking path shaped like the symbol of the sisters of the Order of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ off to the side of the path of the Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline.
The nuns in Lancaster County are not a “community” as we tend to think of it in the civic sense: they’re not a township or city or county like those CELDF traditionally assists. But they are a community of believers within the larger secular community, and the nuns’ struggles to defend their community’s land as sacred earth shows they are allies, and champions of Community Rights and Rights of Nature.
No matter your religious persuasion, as community members in the United States, many tend to hold certain things – like our individual rights – as sacred and inviolable. Sadly, as this order of nuns in Pennsylvania has learned, corporate rights have superseded individual rights, including individual rights to practice your religion.
For nearly 100 years, the sisters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ have ministered to their community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Initially, they ran a girls’ school, but as the local order’s members have aged (nearly all are currently in their 70s, 80s and 90s), and the larger community has aged, they now operate a nursing home. Throughout the decades, they have supported these endeavors by farming almost 100 acres around their convent. MORE…