Vatican official, other Christian leaders open Season of Creation

September 09, 2024

» Continue to this story on World Council of Churches

CWN Editor's Note: Sister Alessandra Smerilli, secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, joined Protestant and Orthodox leaders at an online event launching the Season of Creation.

The Season of Creation, an ecumenical initiative, begins on September 1—the World Day of Prayer for Creation in the Orthodox churches (since 1989) and the Catholic Church (since 2015)—and concludes on October 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. In 2019, the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and Pope Francis lent their support to observance of the season.

In a message (scroll down for English), Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who holds a primacy of honor among the Orthodox churches, wrote:

The environmental threat is a dimension of the extended crisis in contemporary civilization. In this sense, confronting the problem cannot be successful on the basis of the principles of the same civilization, of the rationale behind it, which created it in the first place.

We have repeatedly expressed our conviction that churches and religions can contribute significantly to a vital spiritual and evaluative conversion for the sake of the future of humanity and the planet. Genuine religious faith dissolves the arrogance and titanism of humankind, inasmuch as it constitutes the embankment of its transformation into a “man-god,” who abolishes all standards, boundaries, and values, while declaring himself “the measure of all things” and instrumentalizing both his fellow human beings and nature for the satisfaction of his unquenchable needs and arbitrary pursuits.

For all current news, visit our News home page.

There are no comments yet for this item.