Sister Mary Jo McDonald, SCL, recently retired from 33 years of parish ministry at St. Ann’s Church in Butte, Montana. Although she has moved back to Leavenworth, Kansas, she is still working on behalf of the people of Butte.
Sister Mary Jo has been named the board chairperson of the Butte Watchdogs for Social and Environmental Justice. This citizen-based nonprofit demands quality, timely, and science-based solutions for the city’s Superfund cleanup.
“Keeping a critical eye out to make sure that Butte gets the best cleanup is something to which I can dedicate myself in retirement,” said Sister Mary Jo.
Butte was named a Superfund site in 1983 due to pollution from years of smelting and strip mining. Sister began working on behalf of the city’s residents when she led a class-action lawsuit effort to clean up Silver Bow Creek, which had been named a “metro storm drain,” even though it was a source of drinking water.
As a pastoral minister at St. Ann’s Church in Butte, Sister Mary Jo worked with a women’s group that prayed and cared for people in need. When talking to the group, she found they were concerned about the city’s water quality. Local parents had been told to include juice and soda in their children’s lunch boxes so the children didn’t have to drink the polluted water. “We were going to have a whole generation that couldn’t drink water,” Sister Mary Jo said.
Butte Watchdogs wants to pressure city officials, who they claim are resistant to clean-up efforts and want to save federal monies for future expansion projects. The group is also pushing for a timelier clean-up effort, which they are told could take 25-40 years.
Sister Mary Jo says Butte Watchdogs is not only a civic organization but one driven by faith. “Making sure Butte is a safe environment is a social justice issue,” she said. Caring for the fragile earth is one of the goals of the SCL Directional Statement.
Even though she now lives in Leavenworth, Sister Mary Jo hopes to travel to Butte in February to continue working on these environmental issues in the city. She hopes that Butte Watchdogs can help facilitate partnerships between British Petroleum, who owns the mines, the city and federal government, engineers, and those who continue to watch and sound the alarm on the state of Butte’s environment.
