“Choose some actions and transform them into everyday habits”, that’s what the road to our ecological conversion is all about. After talking to some members of the Red de Dibujantes (Drawers Network), a community of Latin American artists that emerged during the Season of Creation 2020, we tell you the story of these young people who put their art at the service of the common home.

Cristian Camargo

From Argentina, these illustrators created drawings encouraging Catholics to change their habits in order to care for the common home. But they did it with a common motive: this path of change already began years ago in themselves, and today they want to spread it to others.

Juliana Giletta,

Cristian Camargo told how his ecological conversion began as a child, in his own family: “As a teenager and young man, listening to the cry of the poor, I embarked on a journey. Later, I began a personal process, realizing that everything is connected and that Mother Earth and people have to live together. That’s how my conversion began”.

For Juliana Giletta, it was also a process that began at home, “but my ecological conversion is increasing,” she said. “Starting this process has to be, almost by definition, progressive, because our enthusiasm can fade when we see that there are many habits that we have to change,” she admitted.

Meanwhile, Luis Camargo mentioned: “I work trying to be aware of each of my actions, thinking from the smallest thing what I can contribute and what I generate”, and added that “the first step is to be aware and then find in each one what he or she is called to do”.

Luis Camargo

The three cartoonists said that the best way to transmit the message to other young people is by example: “We must invite people to help others little by little, so that they can begin to make their own process. Just seeing the other person is enough for any of us to get involved in what is happening,” said Cristian.

Juliana recalled the importance of “informing ourselves, being curious, following people in social media, reading, listening to those who know, in order to clear up doubts that may bother us in our conversion. It is also important to generate community, in the parish, in the Laudato Si’ Movement, with friends or in one’s own family”. 

During the month of September, in the framework of the Season of Creation and to promote the Healthy Planet, Healthy People petition, the three drew inspirational pictures. 

Cristian was inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures: “Unlike other classic illustrations, I wanted to draw Leo, a boy I met begging for coins in the streets of La Plata, Argentina, with his little sisters. Leo had those same eyes, of simplicity and poverty, that Francis had at the moment he praised all that was created. 

“This drawing is the call that Pope Francis makes to us, in Laudato Si’, to listen to the ‘cry of the earth’ and ‘the cry of the poor’ in all the poor and children who are in our streets,” he mentioned.

In Juliana’s case, the drawing was intended to encourage people to sign the petition: “I was inspired by the call of the universal Church as a driving force of people united for the conservation of the earth, our common home,” she explained.

The drawing shows hands with different skin tones and, at the same time, the petition’s requests: ” Working together for the climate emergency and the biodiversity crisis in an egalitarian way, including those most affected and protecting human rights”.

Luis’ illustration was with the same intention: “I was inspired by the great number of young people committed to climate change. These young people make a difference and are the voice of this earth.”

The Cartoonists Network is made up of more than 25 Catholic artists from different Latin American countries who, through the dissemination of their drawings on social networks, promote ecological conversion, inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’.