This year the Season of Creation ends on our Cetenary
At half past six on the evening of 1 September, Rome time, Pope Leo XIV will preside at the Mass for the Care of Creation in the Garden of the Madonnina at the Borgo Laudato Si’, inside the Pontifical Gardens of Castel Gandolfo. It is the eleventh World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, and it is the first time a pope has personally presided at the Eucharist on the day. He will be using the Mass formulary he approved last year.
The message heard with Franciscan ears. Pope Leo’s message for the day, signed on the Assumption, takes its title from Isaiah: they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. War, he writes, leaves social and ecological destruction that lasts for generations, and armed conflict and environmental degradation feed one another in a cycle. Ecosystems destroyed, air and water contaminated, food security undermined, poverty and inequality deepened, and out of that, new conflicts.
He then links the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor to war.
“The wounds of war and the degradation of the earth, then, are profoundly linked to the condition of the human heart.”
He quotes Benedict XVI, that the external deserts in the world are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast. The pope then ends his reflection moving us from desert to garden, from division to communion, from violence to peace.
Pope Leo has put peace and creation in the same sentence and will not let them come apart. We see the same paradigm in our lives as Franciscans, shaped by Francis’ Canticle, where the verse about those who give pardon sits between the creatures and Sister Death. Francis did not write an ecology poem and then add a peace verse. He wrote one song, which we carry in our hearts as we mark the eighth centenary of his Transitus.
A blessed Creation Day to all of you.
-friar Michael Lasky OFM Conv.,
General Delegate for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation
