By Robert Royal
Pope Leo will have celebrated the new Mass for the Common Home (or Care of Creation, Missa pro custodia creationis) in Rome by the time this appears today. It isn't a radical recasting of the liturgy - on paper. It mostly just introduces several prayers reminding believers that God created the world and placed us here within the Garden "to cultivate and care for it."(Genesis 2:15) As with the controversies over the Traditional Latin Mass, however, the significance of the Creation Mass goes far beyond the bare words to deep questions.
This Mass clearly has been long in preparation, maybe ever since Pope Francis' 2015 encyclical Laudato si' ("Care for Our Common Home"), though it was only announced, unexpectedly, on July 3, as was the first celebration only six days later. As with that encyclical, controversy is inevitable.
In the Christian tradition, Creation (not mere "nature," much less the reductive term "the environment") has often been described as God's second book of revelation, alongside the Bible, the first book, which gives us fuller understanding of precisely what it is that God made.
It's only very vaguely a "common home," at least since the Fall. We have here now "no abiding city." (Heb.13:14) Several recent popes have rightly emphasized our responsibility to care for what God has given. They less often have recognized the mortal struggle with nature that our forebears experienced. And we still do today. Floods (like the one that just carried off over a hundred people in Texas), droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, wild animals, crop failures, diseases, and more.
As God said to Adam:
Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake;
in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;
Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread. . .(Genesis 3:17-19)
As farmers and even gardeners know, weeds, insects, and other pests proliferate in the "natural" state now. Fruits and vegetables take careful and constant attention, including wise and strong measures against what is otherwise "natural." This perpetual human struggle usually gets lost in current "environmental" debates, even within the Church.
It's easier to ignore such truths now than in the past because the whole world today benefits from technological inventions, which have brought us great improvements in the availability of food, shelter, energy, and health. These gains have also brought considerable losses in harm to the land, oceans, air, and our very sense of our own bodies as part of God's world. (Being "born in the wrong body" makes no sense to anyone with a Biblical perspective.)
We've recently become more aware of the downside of the "progress" of recent centuries and less aware of the benefits. Pope Francis rightly wrote of how the loss of a sense of Creation makes us into rationalists and technologists, mere "masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters." (Laudato Si 11) He and other Churchmen, however, have tended to neglect the role of inventors, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs in producing goods and the means to distribute them.
At the Royal Portal to the Cathedral in Chartres, the arts and sciences are presented as repairing the damage done to Creation by the Fall. We would do well to recover that medieval perspective, alongside proper attention to technological harm, today.
At the same time, in a fallen world, populated by fallen human beings, all we can ever achieve is a precarious balance, amidst various tradeoffs. We live longer and physically better than in the past, but also more precariously. All it would take in our time is the failure of the electric grid or the disruption of the Internet or interruption of the flow of food and other goods from farm to city to produce chaos and death on a glo...
