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If you’re a regular reader of America or tend to follow liturgical developments in the Catholic church, you may remember that in July of this year, the Vatican approved new texts for a “Mass for the Care of Creation.” This Mass began its development under Pope Francis, who wanted the church to have a liturgical way to celebrate the message of “Laudato Si’,” and was presented to the public on July 3, 2025, by Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. About a week later, Pope Leo XIV used the new texts in a Mass with the staff of the “Borgo Laudato Si’” ecology project.
The first reading in the “Mass for the Care of Creation” is also today’s first reading, from the Book of Wisdom.
Not everyone in the church was pleased by the new Mass option. Some folks (no links here, sorry) called the new option “Pope Leo’s Pachamama Mass,” or a change of the Mass “from Sacrifice to ecologism” or worse—and singled out this passage for side-eye. Why? I’m not always sure, but in this case I get the sense that the pope’s detractors are suspicious of any move to associate worship with ecology. Because it just sounds too pagan.
Many years ago I read a homily by Joseph Ratzinger (usually not my fave, to be honest) on Genesis that gave the perfect counter to any concern that Scripture—whether in Genesis, which he was concerned with, or here in Wisdom, or anywhere else—might lend itself to any interpretation that elevated any reality (nature included) above the power and authority of God. And his gloss on the creation of the world perfectly fits the passage above from Wisdom, too.
Of the Genesis account of creation, Ratzinger notes that it has a purpose other than to give a scientific or factual account of how things came to be:
Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world. The world is not, as people used to think then, a chaos of mutually opposed forces; nor is it the dwelling of demonic powers from which human beings must protect themselves. The sun and the moon are not deities that rule over them, and the sky that stretches over their heads is not full of mysterious and adversary divinities. Rather, all of this comes from one power, from God's eternal Reason, which became—in the Word—the power of creation. All of this comes from the same Word of God that we meet in the act of faith.
In other words, Genesis offers something different from other creation myths (or from our own scientific accounts), showing a world not full of demigods at war nor cosmic giants in the form of heavenly bodies nor a creation whose physical form is a cloak for all manner of minor deities or divinized creatures. Yes, the natural phenomena of this world are beautiful and worthy of praise—even God “saw that it was good,”—and we like the ancients might look on “fire, or wind, or the swift air, or the circuit of the stars, or the mighty water, or the luminaries of heaven” and take “joy in their beauty.” But the point of Genesis and the point of Wisdom above is the same in the end: Those things point to something larger, greater. Remember who actually created those things. “Let them from these things realize how much more powerful is he who made them.”
The corollary of that recognition, of course, is that respect and reverence for the things of nature are also respect and reverence for the one who made them. “For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen.” And therefore prayers that exalt creation, and even more so any activities that preserve it and recognize its holiness, are by analogy prayers that exalt God.
So let us praise creation, both with our ancient texts and with our modern words. Think of the beloved song, which makes the same point in the end:
When through the woods and forest glades I wander
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees,
When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze,
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art! |
