TOWNSVILLE’S Holy Spirit Catholic School principal Paul Lucas has committed his life to pursuing and promoting ecological sustainability within the Catholic Church and educating fellow Catholics on the “wonderful gift we have been given”.
Paul was on the Gold Coast recently to guide the second South Coast Sustainability Network Gathering through an audit to assist in developing concrete plans within parishes, schools and agencies.
Born in Townsville, an area surrounded by significant rainforests and adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef, Paul has been actively involved in environmental education for about 35 years.
He said people such as himself with a passion for the care for creation had been around for a long time.
“There has always been people who have developed that passion out of different reasons. Sometimes it’s concern for what’s happening around them, other times it’s a response like St Francis (of Assisi) where they respond in love for the gift of creation and where they use creation as something to keep opening them up to understanding who our God is and how generous our God is,” he said.
Speaking to Paul, it is obvious his love of God is deeply based and was developed from a young age.
He attended St Joseph’s Catholic School, on The Strand, along with another notable Townsville son, Bishop Michael Putney.
“I was two years ahead of Michael Putney so I was a big altar boy when he was a little altar boy and now the roles are reversed (with Bishop Putney as Bishop of Townsville).”
St Joseph’s was also the first school where Paul filled the role of principal in the mid-1970s.
“I was the initial lay principal in the diocese back in 1975 when the nuns and brothers started getting scarce,” Paul said.
Paul’s love of God goes hand in hand with his love of the world God created.
“I think it is something deeply based in my prayer and reflection, in my study and my networks and they have encouraged me and supported me and driven me,” he said.
“This is my call of the Spirit and that’s what I’m responding to.”
And respond he has.
By 1994 Paul was involved in the design, building, and subsequent maintenance and development of the Gumburu Environment Education Centre in the Paluma rainforest, about 70km north of Townsville.
“That environment centre was specifically designed to blend with the environment and it’s also a centre where we do a lot of our education and leadership training,” he said.
Paul said the centre was also used for school camps and by adult groups.
“Part of that (Gumburu) is also the charter for a group that the Catholic Education Office and Bishop (Putney) have called the Diocesan Environmental Awareness Team,” he said.
“That is a group of teachers and some parishioners who look at sustaining the environmental education centre, environmental education in schools – living sustainably – and they look at spirituality to underpin all of that.”
Over the years Paul has been a keen promoter of the Green and Healthy Schools Program and the Reef Guardian Program for schools, and was a foundation member of the Catholic Earthcare Australia Advisory Council in 2002.
In 2004 he was the principal drafter of Let the Many Coastlands Be Glad, a pastoral letter of the Catholic bishops of Queensland on the Great Barrier Reef, and his publication On Holy Ground – an ecological vision for Catholic Education, is used across four states.
Paul paid tribute to the late Pope John Paul II’s call for ecological conversion and urged fellow Catholics to follow the leadership of their own bishops.
“We’ve had very good leadership from our Queensland bishops,” he said.
“The document they put out when we were trying to preserve areas of the Great Barrier Reef, that was a leadership type of statement.
“Our Australian bishops have issued various documents through Catholic Earthcare to get us to think about our water use, with the document on the Murray-Darling and on climate change and so forth so we’ve had good leadership from individual bishops and groups of bishops.”
While much of the work Paul has done over the past 35 years has initially been aimed at the education arm of the Catholic Church, he eventually realised that much of what he and others like him were doing in education, spirituality and living sustainably was applicable to other areas of the wider Church.
“(It was) just as applicable to the parish or just as applicable to Centacare or St Vincent de Paul (Society), so we have been looking at the bigger picture of responding to the culture that is within our Catholic Church, has always been there but died for various historical reasons,” he said.
“We are talking about trying to put people back in touch with the great riches of the teachings of the Catholic Church right back to people like Hildegard, St Francis, St Benedict, St Augustine and all of those early teachers within the Church, and we have had these people – (St) Thomas Aquinas and others – all the way through our history.”
Paul said historically the Church, along with the rest of society, reached a stage where it separated science from theology.
He said the Australian bishops had given Catholic Earthcare the challenge of again blending the two together as the early spiritual writers had done – “to try and take the best of science and bring it with the best of theology and present it in a form that ordinary Catholic can accept and read, or at least appreciate this great culture that we’ve had of sustainability and of spiritual reflection using the first book of God which many of the ancient writers called the Book of creation”.
Paul said it was his contribution to the Creator to try to bring the world to a better place using the Catholic Church as the main vehicle.
“Our God is a generous God, he has spoiled us endlessly with this gift of creation,” he said.
“We need to take St Francis (of Assisi) seriously and pause, enjoy, nurture and try to bring to its proper fullness this wonderful gift that we’ve been given.”
