CNA Staff, 27 June, 2024 / 1:10 pm (ACI Africa).
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.
