CNA Staff, Jun 27, 2024 / 14:20 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis this week called on the faithful to a conversion of heart that extends Christian charity to all of God’s creation and urged them to commit themselves to protecting the environment.
The Holy Father made the remarks as part of a papal message delivered ahead of the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. That observance, established by the pope in 2015, is held on Sept. 1 every year.
Christians, the pope said, bear witness to their faith in part “by caring for the flesh of suffering humanity.” Christianity acknowledges that “everything is ordered to the glory of God,” Francis said; the spirit of “universal fraternity and Christian peace,” he argued, “should also be extended to creation.”
The Holy Spirit “guides us and calls us to conversion,” Francis said, “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.”
Care for creation, the pope said, is not merely an ethical issue but a theological one, one that is marked by the “act of love” in which God created human beings.
“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,” the pope said.
By living out this imperative, “our lives can become a song of love for God, for humanity, with and for creation, and find their fullness in holiness,” he wrote.
The theme for the 2024 day of prayer is “Hope and Act with Creation,” with the motif drawn from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
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 establishment of the day in 2015 was also seen as a sign of unity with the Orthodox Church, which established Sept. 1 as a day to celebrate creation in 1989.
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On the other hand, the perennial Catholic Church might recall that “charity”—like “faith” and “hope”—is a distinct theological virtue…
And, then might still propose that well-advised care for creation is about “love”—especially for future generations of persons on planet earth. This distinction could not be made to appear as endorsing a secularist legal conflation to classify trees, for example, as persons.
But, also, what about this part of the linked “papal message”:
“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, the fruit of a life lived in the spirit of the Gospel” https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/cura-creato/documents/20240627-messaggio-giornata-curacreato.html
“Joachim?”
The idea of Joachim of Flora (1135-1202) was actually condemned at the Synod of Arles (A.D. 1263, a real synod!) because it split/periodized the unity of the Blessed Trinity into a sequence of three historical ages: the Age of the Father (Old Testament), the Age of the Son (from Christ until A.D. 1260), then to be followed by the Age of the Spirit (happily ever after!). With Joachim, who needs Hegel or Marx?
Joachim enthusiasts might conclude that the prophet Joachim simply got the date wrong by seven centuries. That the start date for the final Age of the Holy Spirit was not A.D. 1260—but our current moment as finally revealed in the so-called “spirit of Vatican II,” and now with our Teilhardian experts and “facilitator” bishops of fluid synodality!
What, then, of Jesus Christ as “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8)?