Pope Leo XIV celebrated the first "Green Mass," emphasising climate action and echoing Pope Francis's call to care for creation in a Vatican garden liturgy. (Image courtesy: X/@VaticanNews)
In a powerful show of commitment to environmental sustainability, Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday led the first-ever papal “Green Mass,” using a newly approved liturgy focussed on creation care, The Associated Press reported.
The Mass was held in the gardens of the Vatican’s Laudato Si Center at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer retreat just south of Rome.
“We must pray for the conversion of so many people, inside and out of the church, who still don’t recognise the urgency of caring for our common home,” Pope Leo reportedly said during the open-air service, surrounded by trees and flowers.
“We see so many natural disasters in the world, nearly every day and in so many countries, that are in part caused by the excesses of being human, with our lifestyle”
Wearing green vestments and speaking under a statue of the Madonna, the pope further said, “We hear the cry of the earth, we hear the cry of the poor”, adding that “this cry has reached the heart of God.”
“Our indignation is his, our work is his.”
According to the report, the new Mass rite, titled “for the care of creation,” was inspired by Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, which condemned environmental exploitation and championed climate justice, especially for the poor.
Leo has approved the rite as the 50th in a long list of special Masses structured for particular needs throughout Church history.
“This isn’t about a superficial ecology,” Archbishop Vittorio Viola, who helped craft the new liturgy, told the US-based news agency, adding, “It provides a theological understanding of creation that then becomes action.”
Pope Leo, the first American pope and a former missionary in Peru, has consistently emphasised the link between environmental harm and social injustice. “Climate change provoked by human activity,” he lamented is driving “deforestation, pollution and the loss of biodiversity.”
Spending his vacation in the lush hills of Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo described the setting as “a natural cathedral.”
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