In 2015, shortly after completing his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis declared September 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, as the Orthodox Church has done since 1989.
According to Pope Francis, “The annual World Day of prayer for the Care of Creation offers to individual believers and to the community a precious opportunity to renew our personal participation in this vocation as custodians of creation, raising to God our thanks for the marvellous works that He has entrusted to our care, invoking his help for the protection of creation and his mercy for the sins committed against the world in which we live.”
Pope Francis’s message for 2018 is a meditation on the centrality of water in our lives, our faith, our history – in all life. He reminds us that “our world owes a great social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity” (Laudato Si’, 30).
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