News - August 2020 RSS Feed

Pope Francis established September 1 as an annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation in 2015. It is also the first day of the Season of Creation or Creation Time. The Season of Creation or Creation Time, is marked throughout the Christian world from September 1 to October 4 (Feast of St. Francis of Assisi) and celebrates the joy of creation as well as encouraging awareness-raising initiatives to protect the natural environment. Let’s look at the message of Pope Francis from the World Day of Payer for the Care of Creation from last year. The message for 2020 had not been released by the time this issue of the bulletin had to go to press. Let’s recall some of the remarks that the Holy Father made on this occasion last year:

As he was finishing his address to a joint meeting of Congress on September 24, 2015, Pope Francis mentioned that he would finish his visit to the United States by taking part in the World Meeting of Families that was to be held in Philadelphia. Pope Francis has expressed great concern of the state of the family. He wanted it to be a recurrent theme of his 2015 visit to the United States and it remains a great concern of his in our day as well. Let’s listen in again to what he said to the Congress about the family:

Our Saturday morning book group has begun reading and discussing The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who was a noted author in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The title refers to the mountain of Purgatory mentioned in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Pope Francis referred to Thomas Merton in his speech to the United States House of Representatives and Senate on September 24, 2015. Let’s look now about what he said about Thomas Merton on that occasion:

I continue the presentation of excerpts from the historic address of Pope Francis to the United States Congress on September 24, 2015. In today’s excerpt the Holy Father will discuss Dorothy Day. In his April 13, 2016 column in Crux, John L Allen, Jr. mentioned that one thing that fundamentally links Dorothy Day and Pope Francis is an expansive view of what counts as a “pro-life” cause, reaching out to include not only the unborn but also migrants and refugees, exploited workers, death row inmates, even the planet itself. Life itself must be protected at all stages, and against whatever threatens it.