Thoughts About the Mass for Care of Creation

The Vatican, on July 3, approved a new votive Mass “for care of creation” which Pope Leo XIV celebrated for the first time on July 9. A follow-on from the Francis pontificate promulgated to mark the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si’, the new votive Mass has elicited a variety of contradictory responses. I’ll weigh in: I think it is balanced in the middle, and in medio stat virtus. It’s in the middle because it avoids two extremes: the Scylla of secular environmentalism and the Charybdis of disregard for the inherent good of the temporal world. Let’s examine both.

Secular Environmentalism

Vatican sources said the new text was a response to Laudato Si’s call to recognize human life is “grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor and with the earth itself” (66). That insight is biblically grounded. It is part of what I call our “Genesis heritage,” the common Jewish-Christian patrimony about seeing the world that comes from the first book of the Bible.  

That book also teaches that those relationships are warped by sin. Man hides from God (Genesis 3:8). With only two people in the world, one already blames the other (3:12). The postlapsarian resistance of nature—even one’s body—is already announced by God (3:16-19).

Genesis also teaches a truth we cannot lose sight of: man has dominion over the created world. The “world” and man are not at least co-equal partners. Creation is a tool for human good (Genesis 1:26-28). That dominion over creation is intended by God (1:26), given explicitly to man (1:28), and connected to participation in the divine image and likeness (1:27) because it involves man’s ongoing share in co-creation under God.  

God invites man to co-creation in an IKEA world—assembly required—by which, as rational and responsible creatures, humans can build. They must build responsibly, which means that they can be faithless fiduciaries of that dominion. The solution is conversion: be a faithful fiduciary.

Secular environmentalism neglects this idea. It either denigrates man as a lousy steward of creation and/or makes creation at least man’s co-equal. Those ideas are wrong on Genesis’ warrant. 

Man is not just another creature: he is creation’s apex. All other things are simply decreed; man’s creation is preceded by God’s deliberation and receives a unique dimension—the divine image and likeness. Everything else made is “good.” Only man’s creation is pronounced “very good.” And nothing else is created after man, with God taking His rest—not as an absence from the ongoing work of creation (that would be deism) but because he has other persons with whom to share it.

Pope St. John Paul II repeated Vatican II constantly that “man is the only creature God wanted for himself” (Gaudium et Spes, 24). Who is “himself?” For Augustine, it’s God (Confessions 1,1). For Vatican II (according to Fr. Peter Stravinskas), it is man because seipsam refers to “creature.” So, is “himself” man or God? I suggest we expand the Council to encompass both. God wanted man as man, not just as another creature decorating His world. And God wanted man for God, as a creature capable of a communion of persons with Him who is the Ultimate Communio Personarum in the most important bond of all: love. 

That is not the perspective of secular environmentalism. It is ready to cut man down and aggrandize creation. Consider efforts to confer “rights” on rivers, animals, and other phenomenon, an initiative foretold by Justice William Douglas in his 1972 Sierra Club v. Morton opinion seeking to enfranchise trees.  

A philosopher once asked, if a tree falls in the forest without a man around, does it make a sound? It does—at least for the squirrel who flees being crushed. Today’s question, however, should be: If a tree falls in the forest without a man around, who cares? “Who” applies only to persons. Does a pristine world of babbling brooks, trees, and squirrels “care?” That question needs to be asked by all the young people foregoing parenthood “in the name of the planet.” That is also abandonment of the Genesis heritage. Let’s not overvalue the environment.

Devaluing the Temporal

The danger at the other extreme is downplaying the value of creation. Vatican II affirmed the “autonomy of created things” (Gaudium et Spes, 36) against what I would call “spiritual strip mining.” Strip miners ravished the land to extract coal, then they moved on. Spiritual strip mining tends to think of this world primarily as a test for the world to come, a kind of spiritual Aberdeen Proving Ground that—if you survive—will be rewarded in Heaven. A certain strain of spirituality fostered this view.

It is not truly Catholic because it is tinged with dualism. Creation is good, as Genesis incessantly repeats. Even before Noah, when God speaks of man’s inclination to sin, the flood does not destroy the world as much as cleanse it. The Resurrection is not a throwaway of Jesus’ incarnate body but its transformation. The same can be said of our own resurrection on the last day.

To imagine life, then, as I believe Karl Rahner put it—traveling on one horse until death, then getting off and getting on another horse—is to misrepresent the continuity of God’s goodness. God gives life but ultimately never takes it: like it or not, the life God gave you is meant to last forever, no matter what you do with it.  

In that perspective, dismissing a Mass for “care of creation” as some kind of ecclesiastical tree hugging loses the perspective that the world over which God gave us dominion is valuable: intrinsically albeit finitely. The “world” (together with the flesh and the devil) should not divert us from God; rather, it is intended to lead us to Him. (That is, in part, what natural theology is about). Let’s not devalue creation.