CSJP Leadership Team Statement on Biden-Harris Administration's Welcome Change

We, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace celebrate the policy changes brought about through the executive orders signed by President Joseph Biden yesterday.

First among them, we welcome the decision to rejoin the Paris Climate Accords, re-embracing multilateralism and committing our nation to reversing climate change.  Likewise, the new administration has withdrawn the permit for the Tar Sands Pipeline and banned drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. We encourage further review of permits for all gas and oil drilling especially in lands precious to our Native American sisters and brothers. As we wrote in our 2008 Chapter Act, Seeds of Peace: Care of Creation and Climate Change, “We commit ourselves personally and communally to stand in solidarity and act in justice with marginalized people whose lives are already affected by the devastation of earth.”

Furthermore, we urge the administration to look to the nation’s greatest emitter of carbon, the U.S. military. It is time to cut back on military spending and activity for the sake of our common home, and to consider moving our nation toward joining the UN Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, as those weapons are an ever-present threat to all life on our planet.

Secondly, we rejoice in the reversal of the cruel and life-threatening immigration policies of the previous administration: ending construction of the border wall, recommitting our nation to welcoming refugees, requiring relevant agencies to do everything possible to reunite migrant children with their parents from whom they have been unconscionably separated, and the elimination of the discriminatory Muslim Ban.  We urged in our 2016 Congregational Statement: Welcome Immigrants and Refugees: "All governments to follow international law and expeditiously provide safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers with all rights guaranteed in the UN Convention and Protocol on Refugees, and an immediate end to all rhetoric that instills fear, creates division or incites violence, regardless of the migrants faith or nation of origin.”

Finally, we welcome the President’s vision of unity, the posture of humility and the lived commitment to create a government that represents and looks like our multi-racial nation. This too is a welcome change as we continue to personally and nationally overcome and disarm the forces of white privilege that threatened the very existence of our democracy just two weeks ago.

We join our prayers to those of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the rest of the administration for the healing of our nation and that of all humanity.

“Christ is our peace, the source of our power.

United with him we engage in the struggle

against the reality of evil and continue the work of

establishing God’s reign of justice and peace.”  (Constitution 2)

Congregation Leadership Team
Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace
January 21, 2021