Caring for Our Common Home

 

Pope Leo XIV gestures as he celebrates Mass at the Borgo Laudato Si' center in Castel Gandolfo, Italy, Sept. 1, 2026, marking the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. Credit: (OSV News photo/Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters)

Christians around the world are currently taking part in what is known as Creation Time/Season of Creation/Creationtide, depending on denomination. This is a liturgical development of the past 30 years which acknowledges and celebrates Creation, leading to action. These few weeks commence on September 1st, now called the Feast of Creation in Christ and conclude with the Feast of St. Francis on October 4th. 

Recently the Roman Catholic church released a timely document which is in many respects a sequel to the late Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home from 2015. The International Theological Commission (ITC)  published “Caring for Our Common Home — A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Triune God” with the authorization of Pope Leo XIV, on Wednesday, 2 September This was one day after World Day of Prayer for Creation and is the fruit of reflections carried out between 2022 and 2025.

This is a text of more than 29,000 words, so a serious exploration of Creation Care with a number of important themes including "the sin against creation". In the United Church we aren't inclined to speak about sin or sinners a lot because of the emphasis in some traditions on individual wrongdoing as a form of manipulation that fosters guilt. Yet sin as transgression, a destructive turning away from God and others is an essential aspect of the path to redemption for humans and all living beings. 

This may seem a tad heady but what's happening in the Roman Catholic church is important theological stuff. 

2 Why are we attacking our common home so severely? The sin against creation .

2.1 Breach of the original mandate

84. [ Deception at the root ]. In the first chapters of Genesis, Scripture expresses in an exemplary way how from the beginning of humanity human freedom gives in to deception and claims to occupy the place of God (cf. Gen 38), distancing themselves from the Creator's original mandate. The deception is formulated by the serpent's forked tongue: "You will not die; for God knows that in the day you eat of it, then your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" ( Gen 3:4-5). God has manifested His plan to human beings as rational and free beings. However, when they believe the serpent, they have already distrusted God and distanced themselves from Him. The promise of being like God, provoked by envy, leads to disobedience, typical of those who do not believe what God has said.

85. [ The dynamics of temptation ]. At the key moment, in the formulation of the temptation and in what induces the woman to follow it, three factors come together simultaneously that support and strengthen each other, plus a fourth that unifies everything.

1) The promise of knowledge that would make us like God "in knowing good and evil" ( Gen 3:5), taking God's place in judging good and evil.

2) Food that is truly satisfying and proportionate to human needs. Food, what can and cannot be eaten, is one of the fundamental threads of the plot ( Gen 1:29-30; 2:5, 7:9, 16-17; 3:2-3:5-6:11-14:17-19:22). The temptation consists in not respecting what God has established as good food for us.

3) The attraction that seduces desire and greed contains the false promise of the understanding of good and evil linked to food, providing the final impulse (cf. Gen 3:6). Action based on this radical deception has the paradoxical effect of revealing the essential vulnerability of human beings (cf. Gen 3:7). Human sin has introduced a cosmic disorder (cf. Gen 3:16-17): we no longer inhabit the garden of paradise, but a place where we must coexist with catastrophes and the struggle for life between different species.

4) Eve falls into the deceptive seduction that promises immortality through the forked tongue of the serpent: "You will not die" ( Gen 3:4). The gift of immortality is received from the One who is immortal and eternal. For this reason the Fathers of the Church already spoke of the Eucharist as a medicine of immortality: " phármakon athanasías ", [141] alluding to the gift of immortality in Christ conferred by eating it.

86. [ Breakdown of essential relationships ]. Transgression of God's original plan results in the breakdown of the three essential relationships in which human beings unfold their existence: with God, with other human beings, and with creation, which inevitably leads to deterioration on the personal, social, and cosmic levels. Creation remains wounded by human sin until the Savior, taking on the full weight of the misfortune caused by sin, redeems it with his redemptive suffering.