Pope Francis ‘s Message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation 2024
The theme of the message is “Hope and Act with Creation”
“Hope and Act with Creation” is the theme of the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation: “The theme is drawn from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans (8:19-25), where the Apostle explains what it means for us to live according to the Spirit and focuses on the sure hope of salvation that is born of faith, namely, newness of life in Christ” (Message introduction).
That observance, established by the Pope in 2015, is held on Sept. 1 every year and the chosen date as a sign of unity with the Orthodox Church, which devoted Sept. 1 as a day to celebrate creation in 1989. The pope said in 2015 that the day offers the faithful “a fitting opportunity to reaffirm their personal vocation to be stewards of creation, to thank God for the wonderful handiwork which he has entrusted to our care, and to implore his help for the protection of creation as well as his pardon for the sins committed against the world in which we live.”
The message, signed by Pope Francis on June 27, is broken up into nine sections, which all highlight our responsibility to take care of our Common Home. It stresses that, as Christians called to live in faith and charity, caring for the environment is “a task to be undertaken freely, in obedience to Jesus’ commandment of love.” He also calls for humanity to change its ways by recognizing the harmful impact of war and establishing moral boundaries on the progress of artificial intelligence.
What does it mean to hope and act with Creation? The Pope encourages us to live an “incarnation faith”, one that enters into the suffering and joins forces to rethink the question of human power, its meaning and limits.
How can live out this spirit of universal fellowship? The Holy Spirit calls faith communities to extend the harmony between human beings to creation with responsibility for humane and integral ecology and to conversion, change of lifestyle, to resist environmental degradation.
As Pope writes “The protection of creation, then, is not only an ethical issue, but one that is eminently theological, for it is the point where the mystery of man and the mystery of God intersect. This intersection can be called “creative”, since it originates in the act of love by which God created human beings in Christ…..A transcendent (theological-ethical) motivation commits Christians to promoting justice and peace in the world, not least through the universal destination of goods“.
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- Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash