Hope and Act with Creation is Theme of 2024 Season of Creation
We live in an age of technology and information. With I phones, Apple watches, AI, and robotics, the daily lives of many have become more distanced from contact with God’s creation, from nature.
Sept. 1st is the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. The Season of Creation begins on September 1 and lasts through Oct. 4, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology. This year’s theme is “Hope and Act with Creation,” from Romans 8:19-25. In his message for this day, Pope Francis reminds us that, “In our hopeful and persevering expectation of the glorious return of Jesus, the Holy Spirit…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.”
He quotes from Laudate Deum the following: “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.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement, “Hope, Action and the Eucharist in Creation,” written by Archbishop Borys Gudziak and Bishop A. Elias Zaidan. In their statement they note that a central concern of Pope Francis’ teaching on ecology is the technocratic paradigm, “whereby the unchecked power of technology drives the progressive devastation of the planet. The damaged fruit of our technocratic endeavors, a spoiled planet, is a problem that algorithms, machines and technologies can never solve.”
The U.S. bishops see a connection to this year’s National Eucharistic Congress in the U.S., which reminded Catholics that Jesus is the hope that saves. They conclude their statement with the following: “A true Eucharistic experience will also recommit us to the task of protecting creation, ‘one that is eminently theological, for it is the point where the mystery of man and the mystery of God intersect.’ (Pope Francis) The care for creation is constitutive of the Christian life. So let us go forth with hope, to care for all of God’s creation.”