Pope
marks first World Day of Prayer for Care of Creation
(Vatican Radio) “Today is the World Day of Prayer for the Care
of Creation. Let us work and pray.” That was the papal message on Twitter on
Tuesday as Pope Francis prepared to lead a special Liturgy of the Word in St
Peter’s Basilica marking the Catholic Church’s first Day of Prayer for
Creation.
At his general audience last week the Pope invited local
residents and visiting pilgrims to join him for the Liturgy of the Word in the
Vatican basilica, beginning at 5pm. He also urged Catholics around the world to
contribute to solutions to the environmental crisis facing our planet by
organizing their own prayer and practical initiatives to mark this new
celebration.
The Pope noted the initiative follows in the footsteps of the
Orthodox Church which, for the past 25 years, has dedicated September 1st, the
beginning of a new year in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, to care for the
environment. Since that time, the World Council of Churches has also marked a
month-long‘Time for Creation’ stretching from September 1st to the feast of St
Francis of Assisi on October 4th.
In his encyclical letter ‘Laudato Si’, Pope Francis
quotes what he calls the “deep concerns” and “valuable reflections” of the
spiritual leader of the Orthodox world, Patriarch Batholomew, whom the Holy
Father met twice last year, in Jerusalem and at his home in Istanbul.
Among the five speakers introducing the Pope’s new encyclical in
the Vatican Synod Hall on June 18th was the Orthodox Patriarch’s personal
envoy, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, who suggested that all the Christian
churches might consider, as an ecumenical gesture, the idea of marking a joint
day of prayer for creation.
Less than two months later, Pope Francis wrote to Cardinal Peter
Turkson, head of the Vatican’s Justice and Peace Council, to announce his
intention of instituting an annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation
within the Catholic Church.
“The ecological crisis”, the Pope wrote in his encyclical,
“summons us to a profound spiritual conversion…….The annual World Day of Prayer
for the Care of Creation will offer individual believers and communities 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.....We
live at a time when all Christians are faced with the same decisive challenges,
to which we must respond together, in order to credible and effective”.
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