Catholic nuns in Pa. build a chapel to block the path of a gas pipeline planned for their property

Catholic nuns in Pa. build a chapel to block the path of a gas pipeline planned for their property


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Sister George Ann Biskan leads a group of nuns and supporters during a prayer service at a chapel in a cornfield. The chapel was built there as part of a protest against a pipeline. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
By Julie Zauzmer July 16 at 9:55 PM

COLUMBIA, Pa. — The end of the road, where the street suddenly stops and the towering wall of corn begins, always called out to Linda Fischer. She would pedal her bike there slowly as a child, back before they built any houses on the road, when it was just the cornstalks growing thick toward the sky. It was the silence she found there, the holiness she felt in that stillness, that led her to dedicate her life to God. Fischer has always known this land as sacred. Now the 74-year-old nun and her sisters in their Catholic order suddenly find themselves fighting to protect the land from an energy company that wants to put a natural gas pipeline on it.
“This just goes totally against everything we believe in — we believe in sustenance of all creation,” she said.
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The Adorers and their supporters’ nascent faith-based resistance, which has been compared to the anti-pipeline activism led by Native Americans at Standing Rock, N.D., could eventually set a precedent in a murky area of religious freedom law. U.S. appeals court judges have ruled inconsistently on whether federal law protects religious groups from eminent domain in such cases. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which covers Delaware, New Jersey and the part of Pennsylvania where the nuns reside, has yet to issue a ruling on the matter. Legal observers say a case could make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “There is something to this ‘holy land’ thing,” said Dan Dalton, a Michigan land-use and zoning attorney and the author of a book on the litigation of religious land-use cases. “There haven’t been a lot of appellate cases. . . . It really is a relatively new issue.”

All of the Adorers’ communities, including this one in Pennsylvania’s rural Lancaster County, agree to conduct their business transactions in keeping with the principles of ecological justice the sisters drafted in 2005, known as their “land ethic.” The nuns have joined in protesting hydroelectric power in Brazil and worked with Guatemalans opposed to gold mining. So when a surveyor for Williams came by to tell the nuns that he was checking out their land for the company’s Atlantic Sunrise pipeline that will eventually cut across 183 miles of Pennsylvania, the nuns turned to their land ethic, and they told the surveyor that they couldn’t even discuss it.

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Another federal law, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000, could more specifically protect the nuns, depending on a judge’s interpretation. That law seeks to shield religious institutions from land-use laws that would otherwise impose a substantial burden on their religious exercise. But the nation’s appellate courts have offered differing opinions on whether the law applies to eminent domain. The 3rd Circuit, where the Adorers are located, has never ruled on that question, several lawyers familiar with this area of law said, so the nuns may be the ones to set the precedent.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/catholic-nuns-in-pa-build-a-chapel-to-block-the-path-of-a-proposed-gas-pipeline/2017/07/16/0096e7ce-6a3c-11e7-96ab-5f38140b38cc_story.html?utm_term=.4a362f664735