Dear Parishioners,
A new school year opens this week and we welcome back the pupils and staff of our four schools
During his general audience on Wednesday, Pope Francis appealed for those with influence to “listen to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, who suffer most because of the unbalanced ecology.”
A day of prayer for creation was instituted by the Orthodox Church in 1989 and the current leader, Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis have worked hand in hand to promote growing awareness of climate change and the challenges facing the future of our planet.
In 2015, Patriarch Bartholomew’s personal envoy, John Zizioulas, was one of the speakers at the presentation of Laudato si’, Francis’s landmark encyclical on environmental ecology. In the document, Francis praised Patriarch Bartholomew’s work for the environment. Zizioulas suggested that all the Christian churches start marking the day together. Pope Francis immediately embraced the idea, and decided to institute the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation in the Catholic Church.
In his letter announcing the decision, Francis said the annual commemoration would offer individual believers and communities a fitting opportunity to reaffirm their personal vocation to be stewards of creation, to thank God for the wonderful handiwork which he has entrusted to our care, and to implore his help for the protection of creation as well as his pardon for the sins committed against the world in which we live.
“The celebration of this Day, on the same date as the Orthodox Church, will be a valuable opportunity to bear witness to our growing communion with our Orthodox brothers and sisters,” the pope wrote at the time. “We live at a time when all Christians are faced with the same decisive challenges, to which we must respond together, in order to be more credible and effective. It is my hope that this Day will in some way also involve other Churches and be celebrated in union with similar initiatives of the World Council of Churches.”
I mentioned recently that we must start a group of interested parishioners and others who are prepared to put and keep Laudato Si on the parish agenda.
The parish Forum meets on 20th and this will be a major item on the agenda.
Fr John