The Tip of the Iceberg: The Global South, Pope Leo, and a Mass for Creation

On October 1, Pope Leo XIV blessed an iceberg. (As Robin might say to Batman, “Holy iceberg!” Sorry.) The blessing was part of the agenda for an international gathering at Castel Gandolfo around the theme of “Raising Hope for Climate Justice.” The conference brought together a number of ecclesial, political, and scientific leaders (especially from the Global South) to mark the tenth anniversary of Laudato si’. In his own address there, Pope Leo reminded those gathered of the encyclical’s timeliness: “Let us give thanks to our Father in heaven for this gift we have inherited from Pope Francis! The challenges identified in Laudato si’ are in fact even more relevant today than they were ten years ago.”

After his address, Pope Leo presided over a litany of petitions that expressed hope for our common home; during those petitions, as a way to show the global reach of the ecological crisis, representatives from each continent poured water from their homelands into a common basin. The melting iceberg, hewn from a shrinking glacial sheet in Greenland, represented Antarctica. At the conclusion of the prayer service, Pope Leo extended his hand over the iceberg and then prayed: “Lord of life, bless this water. May it awaken our hearts, cleanse our indifference, soothe our grief, and renew our hope. Through Christ, our Lord.”

The reaction from some U.S. Catholics on social media was, unfortunately, predictable. Various commentators denounced Pope Leo’s act as “pagan,” “communist,” and “Earth-worshipping.” Others simply dismissed it through sarcasm. Needless to say, online histrionics do not reflect the fullness of ecclesial reality (in fact, as somebody who has no social media presence, I was not even aware of the blessing until people wrote about the online reactions!). And blessing water—even as it melts from its solid form—is obviously a venerable sacramental tradition.

I fear and suspect, however, that the online reactions manifest a deeper problem: namely, the ongoing assumption that care for creation is somehow a politicized, and thus discardable, imposition on the Gospel. It is a refusal to see, as Pope John Paul II insisted thirty-five years ago, that “responsibility within creation and [Christians’] duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith.” As Pope Leo himself asked at the conference, “What must be done now to ensure that caring for our common home and listening to the cry of the earth and the poor do not appear as mere passing trends or, worse still, that they be seen and felt as divisive issues?”

If we are to begin answering that plea, we need a fuller picture of magisterial teaching on care for creation as it has emerged from Laudato si’. Fortunately, ten years after the encyclical’s release, three consecutive days in July offered three key, magisterial receptions of Laudato si’. On July 1, the episcopal conferences of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean released A Call for Climate Justice and the Common Home: Ecological Conversion, Transformation, and Resistance to False Solutions. On July 2, Pope Leo XIV shared his message for the World Day of Prayer for Creation. On July 3, the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments jointly decreed and presented a new formulary of the Roman Missal for a “Mass for the Care for Creation.”

All three events were announced from the Vatican. Read together, they form a helpful triptych for reading Laudato si’ through prophetic, eschatological, and liturgical lenses today. Even more, these three receptions can help us appreciate the breadth and (more importantly) the depth of care for our common home in a way that moves beyond polarized partisanship. After all, as Pope Francis repeated in Laudato si’, “everything is interconnected.”

A Prophetic Reception of Laudato Si’

Among Pope Francis’s most notable achievements in Laudato si’ was his inclusion of ecclesial voices from around the globe. In a way unparalleled in previous social encyclicals, he cited twenty-one different episcopal conferences, from Japan to South Africa.[1] The message was clear. The breadth of the ecological crisis demands listening to the broader ecclesial communion that spans our entire common home. That is, in Laudato si’, Pope Francis advanced a synodal ecclesiology long before synodality was cool. The payoff then was the same as it should be today. This ecclesiology “from below” could better attune the Church to what exactly is happening to our common home, to hear more clearly the cries of the earth and the poor (LS §§19, 49).

A Call for Climate Justice and the Common Home shows the fruit of that ecclesiological achievement. It is a unique magisterial text insofar as it emerges from the “collective discernment” of four distinct episcopal conferences (§14). Through that synodal collaboration, the bishops join as one voice on behalf of the Global South. Whether in the form of “desertification in Africa, deforestation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and coastal displacement in Asia,” the Global South suffers the most from the ecological crisis, after all (§24). Indeed, this explains why so many attendees at the “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” conference hailed from the Global South. In A Call for Climate Justice and the Common Home, ahead of the COP30 in Brazil, the bishops hope to amplify the cries of the earth and the poor resounding from those regions of our common home. As the recent papabile Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu stated at the accompanying Vatican press conference, the document “is not just an analysis: it is a cry for dignity.”

Thus, the rhetoric of A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home is self-consciously prophetic. “We raise,” announce the bishops, “a prophetic voice calling for peace through an ecological conversion that transforms the current model of development based on extractivism, technocracy and the commodification of nature” (§8). That claim to the prophetic mantle illumines the rest of the text. According to Abraham Heschel, prophetic utterance entails “urging, alarming, forcing onward, as if the words gushed forth from the heart of God, seeking entrance to the heart and mind of man, carrying a summons as well as an involvement.”[2] The writers of A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home play the part. Strident verbs like “reject,” “defend,” “demand,” “denounce,” and “condemn” fill the text’s pages in a way that makes the calls of Laudato si’ sound almost irenic.

Nevertheless, this rhetoric carries forward a trajectory begun in Laudato si’. Who can forget Pope Francis’s plaintive cry there that “the earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” (LS §21)? This language only darkened in Laudate Deum, Pope Francis’s 2023 apostolic exhortation focusing on the climate crisis. There, the pope regretted “that global crises are being squandered when they could be the occasions to bring about beneficial changes” (LD §36), diagnosed how the drive to consumption “monstrously feeds upon itself” (LD §21), and likened an overconfidence in technical solutions to “a form of homicidal pragmatism, like pushing a snowball down a hill” (LD §57). With the increasingly palpable costs of the ecological crisis and the increasingly ominous forecasts regarding their effects, this language only intensifies in A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home. Hence, declare the bishops, “we affirm the urgent need for a structural transformation of the way we live,” for “the climate crisis will not wait” (§§14, 17).

One reason for this urgency is the colonizing spread of the technocratic paradigm, the excessive embrace of the instrumental rationality that ultimately ravages human and non-human creation alike. What Pope Francis described as the “ironclad logic” (LS §108) of the paradigm absorbs responses to the ecological crisis into its own market-driven, power-hungry logic and “blinds us” (LD §24) to the magnitude of the crisis. A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home forcefully channels a critique of the technocratic paradigm in light of the signs of the time in the Global South. The bishops reject the “financialization of nature,” an initiative “that transforms vital elements of creation, such as forests, rivers and the climate, into negotiable financial assets, as if they were ‘ecosystem services’ and therefore commodities subject to the logic of profit” (§14).

They characterize recent calls for a “green economy”—attempts to couple economic growth and environmental care—as operating from “a technical-instrumental logic at the service of the ecological restructuring of capitalism” and “reinforcing dependence on central economic paradigms, concentrating power in corporations and regulatory complexes, and deepening structural inequalities between developed economies and disadvantaged regions” (§21; see also LS §194). They accordingly oppose both “clean energy initiatives”—like certain production patterns of batteries and electric cars—that depend on intensive mining techniques and “hydroelectric, solar and wind power megaprojects” that “concentrate economic power and destroy ecosystems” (§§22-23; see also §§26-37). The appeals of A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home run much deeper than a greenwashing of capitalism.

Indeed, the bishops advocate for nothing less than a total transformation of the economic status quo. Quite simply, they “propose a model aligned with planetary boundaries and with goals for degrowth” (§26). Besides marking a new stage in magisterial documents on care for creation, the explicit invocation of degrowth language indicates the rising level of ecclesial exasperation toward the global financial system.[3] Specifically, in this Jubilee Year of Hope, the bishops draw upon the theme of “ecological debt”—the environmental costs of consumption imposed on poorer countries—that Pope Francis discussed in Laudato si’ (LS §§51-52). They demand that the Global North repay its “climate debt” as a financial and moral obligation (§§17-18; see also §§25-26). They also urge “the deployment and implementation of ethical, decentralized and appropriate technologies for sustainable development, designed and decided jointly with peoples and communities” (§23).

Echoing the recommendations of the 2019 Pan-Amazon Synod, the bishops include here support for “ancestral territories and domains,” “family farming,” and “climate refugees and migrants expelled from their lands by environmental disasters” (§§24-25). While Pope Francis received some criticism for his failure to adequately incorporate the voices of women in Laudato si’,[4] A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home insists that, since women are “disproportionately affected by climate change,” environmental policies must be proactively “responsive to women’s needs” (§§9, 28). The bishops hope that such pleas can surmount the technocratic paradigm.

A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home is a powerful text that ensures the appeals of Laudato si’ remain concretely prophetic. For me, as I sit in the comforts of my office, the text serves as a genuine wake-up call to grasp the deep anguish of the Global South that emanates from our consumption in the Global North and affords me an opportunity, however meagerly, to stand in solidarity with the global body of Christ (see especially 1 Cor 12:23-24). Nevertheless, I wonder if the text is radical enough. It is theologically thin. Most glaringly, there is no mention of Christ.

On this score, one is reminded of Clodovis Boff’s recent, scathing open letter to the bishops of Latin America: his fear that they “keep repeating the same old refrain: social issues, social issues, social issues” to the point that “Christ’s centrality in the Church” has been “pushed into the background.”[5] The closest invitation in A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home to any sort of religious conversion is a call to a “joyful simplicity” or “what indigenous peoples call ‘Buen Vivir’ (‘Good Living’)” (§19). Likely, part of the reason for this theological paucity is the intended audience of A Call to Climate Justice and the Common Home: namely, representatives at the upcoming COP30. Still, in its almost exclusive focus on structural transformation, the text risks mirroring the very technocratic tendencies it judges as so detrimental to our common home.[6] If we are to view care for our common home as something more than a partisan call, we need a more expansive vision.

An Eschatological Reception of Laudato Si’

To this end, the prophet does more than denounce. “It is the task of the prophet,” Walter Brueggeman submits, “to bring to expression . . . new realities against the more visible ones of the old order.”[7] The prophet, we might say today, expresses and imagines new theocentric realities against the more visible ones of the technocratic order. In his message for 2025 World Day of Prayer for Creation, Pope Leo XIV does just that.

Papal messages for World Days of Prayer for Creation represent part of the legacy of Laudato si’. In 1989, Patriarch Demetrios of Constantinople began this tradition as a way to recall Christians’ environmental responsibilities on September 1 of each year (the first day of the Orthodox liturgical calendar). In 2008, the World Council of Churches invited Christians to start observing a “Season of Creation” from September 1 to October 4 (the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi). In 2015, as a commitment to Laudato si’ and as an ecumenical gesture, Pope Francis began releasing messages for the day and, in 2019, invited Catholics to celebrate the Season of Creation as well.[8] Since then, popes have annually used messages to repeat and expand the call to care for our common home. By and large, the messages have been both theologically sophisticated and bracingly evocative.

Pope Leo has recently continued this tradition. Prior to the message’s release, he had already referenced the ecological crisis with some regularity. In his homily at his papal installation Mass, for instance, Pope Leo situated his programmatic call for “a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world” amid “an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest.” He gave this call to care for our common home a synodal twist in his homily for the vigil of Pentecost: “The earth will rest, justice will prevail, the poor will rejoice and peace will return, once we no longer act as predators but as pilgrims. No longer each of us for ourselves, but walking alongside one another. Not greedily exploiting this world, but cultivating it and protecting it.” Both capture the ecclesiological shape of care for our common home.

While these references have been asides, the message for the tenth World Day of Prayer for Creation is the first text that Pope Leo has devoted specifically to care for our common home. The message is centered around the theme (originally picked by Pope Francis) of “Seeds of Peace and Hope.” Its eschatological orientation resonates quite providentially with our Augustinian pope. Just as Saint Augustine distinguished the cities of God and Man through their alternative conceptions of our ultimate telos, so too does Pope Leo draw attention to the biblical conception of creation’s ultimate telos. In the message, Pope Leo quotes the prophetic words of First Isaiah:

A spirit from on high will be poured out on us, and the wilderness will become a fruitful field, and the fruitful field a forest. Then justice will dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness abide in the fruitful field. The work of righteousness will be peace, and the work of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places (Is 32:15-18).

In this oracle, Isaiah conveys God’s promises that the aridity of Israel’s desolation will one day cease, when—in a proto-Pentecostal image—God’s Spirit will fructify the earth. It is a hopeful vision meant to console and, perhaps more importantly, cajole Israel to recommit itself to God’s steadfast love. Isaiah’s vision, as per prophetic utterance, brings to expression an alternative imaginary to the desolating order of Israel’s present.

Isaiah’s aims coincide with Pope Leo’s response to the ecological crisis. Today, the aridity addressed by Isaiah offers more than a metaphor, as displayed by phenomena like deforestation and desertification. (This explains the powerful symbolism of Pope Leo’s blessing of water at the “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” conference.) Such phenomena typify how, as Leo worries, “nature itself is reduced at times to a bargaining chip, a commodity to be bartered for economic or political gain”; rather than a common home, creation consequently “turns into a battleground for the control of vital resources.” “Those who are most hurt” by this worldview “are the poor, the marginalized and the excluded. The suffering of indigenous communities is emblematic in this regard.” Here, Leo echoes the diagnoses offered by the bishops of the Global South.

The redemption of this pain—the realization of Isaiah’s eschatological vision—comes through Christ. Pope Leo underscores Jesus’s comparison of the Kingdom of God to a seed (Mk 4:26-31) and Jesus’s likening of himself to a grain of wheat that dies to bear fruit (Jn 12:24). The same goes for discipleship: “In Christ, we too are seeds and, indeed, ‘seeds of peace and hope.’” That is, insofar as we dwell with Christ, a (Holy) spirit from on high will be poured out on our entire common home. Then will the wilderness become a fruitful field; then will people abide in a peaceful habitation. Leo calls the Church to commit to this eschatological mission. Through the Body of Christ, “seeds of hope will multiply, to be ‘tilled and kept’ by the grace of our great and unfailing Hope, who is the risen Christ.” Dated June 30, Memorial of the First Martyrs of Rome, Leo calls to mind how the martyrs—as Tertullian said, “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church”—sow this alternative, Christocentric vision.[9]

Pope Leo’s message represents his most official reception of Laudato si’ to date. It highlights the eschatological coda found in Laudato si’ (LS §§243-45), a motif that has been left relatively untouched in theological commentary on the encyclical.[10] We can read the message as a meditation on Pope Francis’s Christocentric claim that “the ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things. . . . Human beings, endowed with intelligence and love, and drawn by the fullness of Christ, are called to lead all creatures back to their Creator” (LS §83). Still, Pope Leo’s message remains at the level of meditation. In terms of style, it is more measured and subtle than previous messages for the day. Moreover, the message’s brevity and generality mean that it includes little detail about how specifically to live as seeds of peace and hope in the here and now.

A Liturgical Reception of Laudato Si’

For that here and now, there stands the work of praise. To return to Brueggeman, “no more subversive or prophetic idiom can be uttered than the practice of doxology, which sets us before the reality of God, of God right at the center of a scene from which we presumed he had fled.”[11] If prophetic utterance brings to expression new realities against the more visible ones of the old order, then the praise of God redemptively affirms those new realities as right and just. It is no accident then that both Laudato si’ (“Praised be”) and Laudate Deum (“Praise God”) framed their calls to care for our common home doxologically. As Pope Francis starkly concluded Laudate Deum, “‘Praise God’ is the title of this letter. For when human beings claim to take God’s place, they become their own worst enemies” (LD §73). The approach taken in these texts is so distinctive that they can even invite a liturgical reconfiguration of Catholic social teaching.[12] So too do they invite a deeper realization of the social ethic implied in our worship. If Pope Francis could assert in Laudato si’ that “in the Eucharist all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation” (LS §236), then not only should our lex credendi match our lex orandi, so too should our lex orandi match our lex credendi.

The Vatican’s promulgation of a formulary for a “Mass for the Care for Creation”—adding it to the already extant forty-nine “Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions” included in the Roman Missal—moves toward that goal. It is, after all, through the Eucharist that we partake in Christ and thus become seeds of peace and hope that give life to our common home. At first glance, the same critique against “Masses for Peace” could be leveled against “Masses for the Care for Creation”; just as every Mass is a Mass for peace, isn’t every Mass a Mass for the care for creation? Of course.

As Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, reminded people in the press conference that accompanied the announcement, “Creation is not an added theme but is always already present in the Catholic liturgy.” Or, as Monsignor Vittorio Francesco Viola—secretary for the Dicastery for Worship and Sacraments—put it at the same press conference, “The Liturgy, which makes the Paschal Mystery present, celebrates at every moment of the liturgical year the mystery of creation, which has its culmination in Easter.”[13] Viola highlighted in particular the presentation of the gifts at Mass, the materiality of the sacraments (see LS §235), the unfortunately neglected Rogation and Ember days, and the protological themes in the Liturgy of the Hours. We can likewise add the blessing of various natural objects, like water. Both Czerny and Viola offer salutary reminders of the latent ecological ethic always already present in our worship.

There nonetheless persists a split between our worship and our lives. As Czerny explained, the new Mass formulary “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.” The prayers in the formulary elicit an alternative vision of the human person: one based not on anthropocentric exploitation but on theocentric wonder. So, the entrance antiphon is Psalm 19, where “the heavens declare the Glory of God, and the firmament proclaims the work of his hands” (v. 2). The new collect lends a Trinitarian shape to the affirmation of this glory: “God our Father, who in Christ, the firstborn of all creation, called all things into being, grant, we pray, that docile to the life-giving breath of your Spirit, we may lovingly care for the work of your hands.” (Besides capturing the Christocentric nature of reality, this prayer provides an intriguing pneumatological connection to the invocation of Isaiah 32 in Pope Leo’s Message for the World Day of Prayer for Creation.[14])

So too do the suggested biblical readings attempt to counter excessively anthropocentric misinterpretations of the biblical story.[15] The Old Testament reading, from the Book of Wisdom (13:1-9), condemns those who fail to perceive God through creation and beckons us to acknowledge how “from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen” (v. 5). Either Psalm 19 (again) or Psalm 104 can serve as the responsorial psalms. In Psalm 104—which Elizabeth Johnson labels “an eye opener” for depicting “the structure of creation [as] more like a circle with humans in the mix, not a pyramid with humans at the pinnacle”[16]—the psalmist marvels, “How varied are your works, Lord! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (v. 24). The second reading comes from Saint Paul’s famous hymn to the cosmic Christ (Col 1:15-20), through whom and for whom “all things were created” (v. 16).

Finally, the Gospel readings include either a selection from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Mt 6:24-34), where Jesus memorably instructs his disciples to look to the birds and their sustenance as a reminder of the Father’s generosity, or the story of Jesus calming the sea (Mt 8:23-27). Both readings—like Paul’s hymn—convey God’s absolute sovereignty over creation and, by extension, how Christ’s mission extends to all creation.[17] The liturgy accordingly summons believers, docile to the life-giving breath of the Holy Spirit, to wondrously participate in all creation’s orientation toward the Father through Christ.

This eschatological, Christ-centered transformation occurs proleptically in the liturgy of the Eucharist. The new prayer over the offerings—which adds the line, “bring to completion in them the work of your creation”—orients the fruit of the earth, the work of human hands, and, by extension, all creation toward their final eucharistic fulfillment. Indeed, the new communion antiphon comes from Psalm 98: “All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.” In the Eucharist—where bread, wine, and thus the many natural processes that undergird both become the Body and Blood of Christ—we actually glimpse the cosmic scope of this salvation, the ultimate consecration and transubstantiation of all reality in, with, and through Christ.[18]

The new prayer after communion names the integral-ecological unity—between God, human beings, and the rest of creation (see LS §66)—thus realized in the Eucharist: “May the sacrament of unity which we have received, O Father, increase communion with you and with our brothers and sisters, so that, as we await the new heavens and the new earth, we may learn to live in harmony with all creatures.” In the press conference, Viola linked this prayer to the Eucharistic, Franciscan vision of Laudato si’:

Communion with God, with one’s neighbor, with the earth is nourished by the Eucharist, “sacrament of unity,” and from it is directed toward its ultimate fulfillment, toward the fullness of communion in which all things will be new. The harmony with all creatures, which we contemplate in Francis of Assisi, can only be born, as it was for the Poverello, from an experience of reconciliation that makes communion with God and with our brothers and sisters possible.

In other words, the Mass for the Care for Creation makes more explicit the integral ecology contained and celebrated in each and every Mass. As an homage to our Augustinian pope, the official decree for the new Mass starts by channeling the doxological spirit not of Saint Francis but of Saint Augustine: “Let your works praise You, that we may love You; and let us love You, that Your works may praise You.”[19] In the Eucharist, through that praise and through that love, everything is indeed connected.

This liturgical reception of Laudato si’ helps name the spirit animating both the encyclical and earlier papal writings on creation. Again, Viola captured it well when, at the press conference, he concluded that “the texts of this formulary are a good antidote against a certain reading of Laudato si’ that risks reducing the depth of its content to a ‘false or superficial ecology’ (LS §59) far removed from that ‘integral ecology’ amply described and promoted in the encyclical (cf. LS chap. IV).” It is this liturgical hermeneutic that can best safeguard Laudato si’ against technocratic and partisan cooptation—for, before it is a call to structural transformation, Laudato si’ is a call to a doxological revolution. Already has the new Mass formulary received some critique for being too truncated, anthropocentrically tinged, and failing to take notice of ecumenical efforts to add a “Feast of Creation in Christ” to the liturgical calendar. Those critiques notwithstanding,[20] when we read the new Mass in tandem with A Call for Climate Justice and the Common Home and this year’s Message for the World Day of Prayer for Creation, we can begin to see the sort of integral-ecological transformation that such a Mass—and indeed all Masses—demand.

Conclusion

On July 9, Pope Leo celebrated the first Mass for the Care for Creation. The Mass took place in the gardens of Borgo Laudato Si’, an integral-ecological educational center that Pope Francis established at Castel Gandolfo in 2023. Delivered from what Leo described as “a ‘cathedral of nature,’ with so many plants and elements of creation that have brought us together to celebrate the Eucharist,” the pope’s homily was at once prophetic, eschatological, and liturgical. He encouraged “the Church to speak prophetically, even when it calls for the courage to oppose the destructive power of the princes of this world” and prayed “for the conversion of the many people, inside and outside the Church, who do not yet recognize the urgent need to care for our common home.” In this way might “we hear the cry of the earth and we hear the cry of the poor, because this plea has reached the heart of God. Our indignation is his indignation; our work is his work.”

To the latter point, Leo linked the Church’s mission to that of the cosmic Christ hymned by Saint Paul (Col 1:15-16). In this eschatological vein, “Our mission to care for creation, to foster peace and reconciliation, is Jesus’ own mission, the mission that the Lord entrusts to us.” Finally, as if the setting did not evidence the liturgical nature of this mission enough, Leo insisted that “only a contemplative gaze can change our relationship with creation and bring us out of the ecological crisis.” After all, it is that gaze—call it contemplative, sacramental, or eucharistic—that bridges the prophetic and the eschatological. In making these calls, the homily provided a fitting synthesis to an eventfully weeklong reception of Laudato si’.

It is a bracing synthesis. Ten years after Laudato si’, we still struggle to see that “living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue” and “is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience” (LS §217). As the recent “Iceberg-gate” demonstrates, when it comes to the challenge of care for our common home, it is tempting to instead cocoon ourselves in our algorithmically sealed tribes.

Still, as we saw in that short span in July—where we encountered prophetic, eschatological, and liturgical receptions of Laudato si’—care for our common home represents something more than a partisan enterprise. As Pope Leo (again, in a deeply Augustinian way) explained at the “Raising Hope for Climate Justice” conference, care for our common home is ultimately a matter of the heart: “It is only by returning to the heart that a true ecological conversion can take place.” Indeed, it is a matter of entering into Christ’s Sacred Heart, broken open for all creation (Col 1:20). “For believers,” Pope Leo continued, “this conversion is in fact no different to the one that orients us towards the living God. We cannot love God, whom we cannot see, while despising his creatures. Nor can we call ourselves disciples of Jesus Christ without participating in his outlook on creation and his care for all that is fragile and wounded.” From Pope Leo’s mouth to our ears!