Bringing solar power to the Vatican.

A giant rooftop garden of solar panels will be built next year on top of the Paul VI audience hall, creating enough electricity to heat, cool and light the entire building year-round.

"Solar energy will provide all the energy (the building) needs," said the mastermind behind the environmentally friendly project, Pier Carlo Cuscianna, head of the Vatican’s department of technical services.

And that is only the beginning. Cuscianna told Catholic News Service May 24 that he had in mind other sites throughout Vatican City where solar panels could be installed, but that it was too early in the game to name names.

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He said the Paul VI hall was chosen first for a number of reasons: Cooling and heating the large audience hall makes it one of the top energy guzzlers in the Vatican, and its roof was in need of repair.

When the project is finished, more than 1,000 solar panels will cover the football field-sized roof.

While not revealing how much the solar project will cost, Cuscianna said "it will pay for itself in a few years" from the savings on energy bills.

Whatever solar power the hall is not using will be funneled into the Vatican’s energy grid and benefit other energy needs, he said.

The solar rooftop garden is not the first environmental project the Vatican has undertaken. In 1999, as part of preparations for the jubilee year, the entire lighting system of St. Peter’s Basilica was upgraded to be low-impact. Strategically placed energy-saving light bulbs were installed inside and out, cutting the basilica’s energy consumption by an estimated 40 percent.

In 2000, the Vatican unveiled its own electric motor vehicle recharging station, where electric wheelchairs, scooters and cars could "tank up."

Seems to make a huge amount of sense, aside from everything else, considering the cost of electricity in Europe.

A look at CELAM’s first draft:

Nearly half the draft is devoted to the theology underlying the bishops’ views of discipleship and mission, with specific sections devoted to issues such as vocations and formation. The document emphasizes the need to make Scripture central to Catholic life, a constant theme since the pope’s speech May 13. It also notes the centrality of the Eucharist, a difficult challenge in a region with an average of one priest per 7,000 parishioners.

Christian initiation, continuing formation and Catholic education are seen as key to developing a sense of missionary discipleship. This must be further nourished through participation in groups such as base communities or lay movements, which are given relatively equal weight in the document, although they tend to reflect different ideological stances.

Some inconsistencies in the draft language reflect undercurrents of tension, although several observers have said the tension is less overt than it was at the 1992 general conference in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

One inconsistency involves the use of the terms "base ecclesial communities," "ecclesial communities" or "small communities," depending on the section. The difference, which proponents of base communities say is one of substance rather than semantics, apparently reflects differing viewpoints among the members of the 16 subcommittees that drafted the different sections.

The last third of the document describes pastoral priorities that reflect the faces of the "new excluded." It also calls for renovation of church structures, but offers few concrete recommendations for change.

As plans for the fifth general conference developed over the past year and a half, the greatest expectations were not of a document, but of a "great continental mission" that would breathe new life into evangelization.

John Allen on an effort inspired by Pope John Paul II:

Between now and June 17, New York’s Storm Theatre is presenting three works by Wojtyla: "The Jeweler’s Shop," a three-act meditation on love and marriage; "Our God’s Brother," the story of freedom-fighter-turned artist Adam Chmielowski, later known as Brother Albert, whose struggle between art and a religious vocation parallels Wojtyla’s own biography; and "Jeremiah," an allegory about the Nazi occupation of Poland that mixes Old Testament and Polish history.

The deepest legacy of John Paul II, however, may be less expressed by a small theatre company staging his plays, than the fact that the Storm Theatre exists at all. As its 47-year-old co-founder and artistic director, a devout Catholic named Peter Dobbins, puts it: "The purpose of this theatre is to lead people to God."

Utterly unplanned by anyone in ecclesiastical officialdom, Dobbins’ Storm Theatre is precisely the sort of spontaneous, grass-roots evangelization of culture that John Paul hoped to set loose — confident in the Catholic message, audacious in its determination to "set out into the deep." Since 1997, the Storm Theatre has staged a series of well-reviewed productions. Some, such as "Murder in the Cathedral" and "The Power and the Glory," have explicitly religious themes, but more often they’re secular works with a spiritual and moral undertone.

In a sense, the Storm Theatre is John Paul II’s ad extra> model of the lay vocation in action. Dobbins isn’t interested in reading at Mass, or working in a chancery; his more daring aim is to redeem the entertainment industry from the inside out.

Magister on the "humble Church" of Ratzinger and Ruini

Mark Gauvreau Judge, author of "God and Man at Georgetown Prep" among other things, has been producing short videos on various Catholic matters. Check it out – the latest is on  Dietrich von Hildebrand