Eucharist can re-engage faithful in care of creation: bishops

A “true Eucharistic experience” can re-engage the faithful in caring for God’s creation, two U.S. Catholic bishops said in a joint message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

September 2, 2024

Pope Francis celebrates the Eucharist during Pentecost Mass on May 23, 2021, at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. (Photo: AFP)

By Gina Christian, OSV News
A “true Eucharistic experience” can re-engage the faithful in caring for God’s creation, two U.S. Catholic bishops said in a joint message for the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

On August 30, Archbishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Archeparchy of Philadelphia, chair of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Internal Justice and Human Development, and Bishop A. Elias Zaidan of the Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon, chair of the USCCB’s Committee on International Justice and Peace, published a reflection on the centrality of the Eucharist in the redemption of humanity and the creation divinely entrusted to it.

The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, which falls on September 1, was first proclaimed by the late Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I in 1989, coinciding with the beginning of the Orthodox liturgical year.

In 2015, Pope Francis instituted the celebration in the Catholic Church, saying it offered a “propitious opportunity” for Catholics “to reaffirm our personal vocation as stewards of creation, to thank God for the marvelous work he has entrusted to our care, and to implore his help in protecting creation and his forgiveness for the sins committed against the world in which we live.”

In June, the Pope announced that the theme of this year’s day of prayer would be “Hoping and Acting with Creation.”

The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation also marks the beginning of the “Season of Creation,” which concludes on October 4 with the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, whose “Canticle of the Sun” inspired the title and text of Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.”

The five-week celebration of a “Season of Creation” was first proposed in 2007 at the Third European Ecumenical Assembly, and the World Council of Churches proposed the following year to endorse this time of prayer and action for environmental protection. Since Pope Francis proclaimed the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, Catholics around the world have increasingly participated in the extended celebration of the “Season of Creation.”

In the United States, “the message of hope and care for creation resonates deeply with the Catholic community,” which “continues to experience the joy” of the 10th National Eucharistic Congress held in Indianapolis in July, Archbishop Gudziak and Bishop Zaidan said in their message.

Drawing on the reflections of Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI, the two bishops shared their thoughts on “hope in the Lord in the scientific age” where “an almost spiritual hope in techno-scientific progress” can lead to a drift from a reliance on “amazing grace to amazing gadgets.”

The bishops noted that in his 2007 encyclical “Spe Salvi” (“In Hope We Are Saved”), Pope Benedict XVI identified a profound shift in thinking in the early 17th century that replaced hope in Christ with “faith in progress.” Pope Francis highlighted the dangers of that shift in “Laudato Si’,” which, the bishops noted, highlights a “technocratic paradigm in which the unchecked power of technology is leading to the progressive devastation of the planet.”

“The spoiled fruit of our technocratic efforts, a spoiled planet, is a problem that algorithms, machines and technologies will never be able to solve,” Archbishop Gudziak and Bishop Zaidan said. “If we are to be saved in hope, that hope must be in God.”

The bishops stressed that “we are not left to ourselves” to heal the ravages of environmental exploitation or the ravages of sin on the human condition as a whole, because “God is with us.”

Rebuilding a broken world “can only be done in the continuity of the first building, which has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone, as the rock that holds everything together,” the bishops said.

The Eucharist assures us that “Jesus has chosen to remain with us in a specific and concrete way, in his Body and Blood.”

For this reason, “it should not be surprising that the poor man from Assisi (St. Francis) had a deep reverence and respect for the Body and Blood of the Lord,” Archbishop Gudziak and Bishop Zaidan said.

“The ‘root and source’ of St. Francis’ love for peace, poverty and care for creation was Jesus Christ,” they said, referring to the Second Vatican Council’s description of the Eucharist as the source and summit of Christian life.

“Care for creation is constitutive of the Christian life,” they said. “So let us move forward, with hope, to care for all of God’s creation.”–ucanews.com