An extract from the Pope’s message for the World Day of Care for Creation

The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, will be held on 1 September 2024. Pope Francis released a message indicating the theme of the day as, “Hope and Act with 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.

The Pope said in his message, “Let us begin with a question, how did we come to have faith? It is not simply because we believe in something transcendent, beyond the power of reason, the unattainable mystery of a distant and remote God, invisible and un-nameable. Rather, as Saint Paul tells us, it is because the Holy Spirit dwells within us.

We are believers because the very love of God “has been poured into our hearts” ( Rom 5:5) and the Spirit is now truly “the pledge of our inheritance” ( Eph 1:14). The Spirit enables believers to be creative and pro-active in charity. He sends us on a great journey of spiritual freedom, yet one that does not eliminate the tension between the Spirit’s way of thinking and that of the world, whose fruits are opposed to each other (cf. Gal 5:16-17).

We know that the first fruit of the Spirit, which sums up all the others, is love. Led by the Holy Spirit, believers are children of God and can turn to him with the words “Abba, Father” ( Rom 8:15), just as Jesus did. Moreover, they can do so with the freedom of those who no longer fall back into the fear of death, for Jesus has risen from the dead. This is our great hope: God’s love has triumphed and continues to triumph over everything. Indeed, even in the face of physical death, future glory is already assured for those who live the new life of the Spirit. Nor does this hope disappoint, as was affirmed in the recent Bull of Indiction of the forthcoming Jubilee.

The life of a Christian, is one of faith, active in charity and abounding in hope, as we await the Lord’s return in glory. We are not troubled by the “delay” of the Parousia, Christ’s second coming; for us the important question is whether, “when the Son of man comes, he will find faith on earth” (Lk 18:8). Faith is a gift, the fruit of the Spirit’s presence in us, but it is also a task to be undertaken freely, in obedience to Jesus’ commandment of love.

Such is the blessed hope to which we must bear witness. Yet where, when, and how are we to bear that witness? Surely by caring for the flesh of suffering humanity. As people who dare to dream, we must dream with our eyes wide open, impelled by a desire for love, fraternity, friendship and justice for all.

Salvation embraces creation as an “earthly paradise,” mother earth, which is meant to be a place of joy and a promise of happiness for all. Nonetheless, in the passage of time we are not exempt from pain and suffering: the whole creation groans (cf. Rom 8:19-22), we Christians groan (cf. vv. 23-25) and the Spirit himself groans (cf. vv. 26-27). This groaning expresses apprehension and suffering, together with longing and desire. It gives voice to our trust in God and our reliance on his loving yet demanding presence in our midst, as we look forward to the fulfilment of his plan, which is joy, love and peace in the Holy Spirit.

Pope reassures us that the whole of creation is caught up in this process of new birth and, in groaning, looks forward to its liberation. This entails an unseen and imperceptible process of growth, like that of “a mustard seed that becomes a great tree” or “leaven in the dough” (cf. Mt 13:31-33). Christian hope does not disappoint, nor does it deceive.

The groaning of creation, of Christians and of the Spirit is the anticipation and expectation of a salvation already at work;all the same, we continue to find ourselves enduring what Saint Paul describes as “tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword” ( Rom 8:35). This hope is patient expectation, like that of Abraham. I think of that great visionary believer, Joachim of Fiore, the Calabrian abbot who, in the words of Dante Alighieri, “was endowed with a spirit of prophecy”.

At a time of violent conflicts between the Papacy and the Empire, the Crusades, the outbreak of heresies and growing worldliness in the Church, Joachim was able to propose the ideal of a new spirit of coexistence among people, based on universal fraternity and Christian peace. I spoke of this spirit of social friendship and universal fraternity in Fratelli Tutti, but this harmony among men and women should also be extended to creation, in a “situated anthropocentrism” ( Laudate Deum, 67).

Why is there so much evil in the world? Why so much injustice, so many fratricidal wars that kill children, destroy cities, pollute the environment and leave mother earth violated and devastated? Implicitly evoking the sin of Adam, Saint Paul states: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now” (Rom 8:22). The moral struggles of Christians are linked to the “groaning” of creation, ever since the latter “was subjected to futility” (v. 20). The entire universe and every creature therein groans and yearns “impatiently” for its present condition to be overcome and its original state to be restored.

In our hopeful and persevering expectation of the glorious return of Jesus, the Holy Spirit keeps us, the community of believers, vigilant; he continually guides us and calls us to conversion, to a change in lifestyle in order to resist the degradation of our environment and to engagement in that social critique which is above all a witness to the real possibility of change. To hope and act with creation, then, means above all to join forces and to walk together with all men and women of good will. In this way, we can help to rethink, our power has frenetically increased in a few decades. We have made impressive and awesome technological advances, yet we have not realized that at the same time we have turned into highly dangerous beings, capable of threatening the lives of many beings and our own survival” (Laudate Deum, 28).

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”, that creative act of God enables and grounds the freedom and morality of all human activity To hope and act with creation, then, means to live an incarnational faith, one that can enter into the suffering and hope-filled “flesh” of others, by sharing in the expectation of the bodily resurrection to which believers are predestined in Christ the Lord.

Through faith and baptism, our life in the Spirit begins (cf. Rom 8:2), a holy life, lived as children of the Father, like Jesus (cf. Rom 8:14-17), since by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ lives in us (cf. Gal 2:20). In this way, our lives can become a song of love for God, for humanity, with and for creation, and find their fullness in holiness.