Pope Leo XIV to Celebrate a Mass for the Care of Creation on July 9

Vatican City, July 3, 2025: Pope Leo XIV will celebrate the first “Mass for the Care of Creation” on July 9, 2025, at Castel Gandolfo with the staff of the “Borgo Laudato Sì” educational centre. This was announced on Thursday, July 3, during a press conference at the Holy See Press Office. The Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments have developed a new liturgical formulary, which will be used to celebrate the Mass. The formulary was released during the press conference.

With this new formulary, "the Church is offering liturgical, spiritual and communal support for the care we all need to exercise of nature, our common home. Such service is indeed a great act of faith, hope and charity”, Cardinal Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said during the press conference held on July 3.

"This Mass, dedicated to taking care of creation, calls us to be faithful stewards of what God has entrusted to us – not only in daily choices and public policies, but also in our prayer, our worship, and our way of living in the world," Cardinal Czerny added.

A Way to Promote an Integral Ecology 

This new liturgical text was developed in collaboration with several Vatican dicasteries and was strongly inspired by Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, which this year celebrates the 10th anniversary of its publication. The release of the formulary also falls on the year of the 35th anniversary of St. John Paul II’s 1990 message for the World Day of Peace, titled “Peace with God the Creator, Peace with all of Creation”. 

"'The Mass for the Care for Creation' takes up some of the main positions contained in Laudato Si' and expresses them in the form of a prayer within the theological framework that the encyclical revives," Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, explained during the press conference.

The texts that make up the formulary for this Mass “are a good antidote” against reading Laudato Si’ as concerned with a “false or superficial ecology”, which is “far removed from that 'integral ecology' amply described and promoted in the encyclical". In fact, he described Francis’ encyclical as an “eco-social” text, rather than just “ecological”. 

Remembering Those Affected by Climate Change

“Creation is not an added theme but is always already present in the Catholic liturgy”, as the Eucharist “joins heaven and earth; it embraces and penetrates all creation”, and in it “we bless God for the bread and wine we receive”, Cardinal Czerny said. This Mass can now “increase our gratitude” and also “invites us to respond with care and love” to the issues of today.

Quoting Pope Leo XIV’s message for this year’s World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, released on July 2, the Cardinal additionally highlighted that “in a world where the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters are the first to suffer the devastating effects of climate change, deforestation and pollution, care for creation becomes an expression of our faith and humanity”. 

He insisted, citing Laudato Si’, that “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor are one, and the danger of a superficial ecology” is to believe that the only “problems to be solved are ecological ones” and that this can be done “at the expense of the people”.

Courtesy: Vatican News