Homily from World Day of Prayer for the Care for Creation
Homily from the Mass for the Care for Creation. Sept. 1, 2026
On Sunday NASA launched the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. It will travel to a point in space where the pull of the gravity of the earth and the pull of the gravity of the sun balance out. From there it will take infrared wide-vision pictures of the universe. It will observe dark matter and dark energy and help us to understand how the universe has expanded over the last 13 ½ billion years.
Given what we now know of the universe, how incredibly huge it is and how old it is and the fact that there is so much more to learn, how much more do the words of the Book of Wisdom ring true. How “from the greatness and the beauty of created things,” from “the circuit of the stars” in all their “might and energy” did people not “realize how much more powerful is he who made them. For from the greatness and beauty of created things their original author, by analogy is seen.” The universe is greater than anyone in ancient times could have known, and more mysterious with dark matter and energy, and a vast array of particles and energy. Who knows whether in a hundred years, people may look back at us and think our vision and science are so primitive.
Yet on our little planet in its solar system in a good-sized Milky Way galaxy, we have evolved as rational beings whom God loves and whom he calls to enter into a relationship with the creator and to care for one another and for the planet that we live on.
Yet, as the Gospel tells us, too often we have some to serve mammon, to be caught up in the desire for more and more things. We have polluted too much of the land and the waters, fostered climate change, and face the results of our often thoughtless grasp for more and more. Rather than stopping to smell the beach rose and delight in the violet and be awed by the rising or setting sun, we pile up thing after thing for the media tell us that we have to have more. In the meantime, the earth and the poor suffer too many of the consequences.
We too seldom stop to consider what a moral world looks like and how we are called to care not just for ourselves but for all of the coming generations.
As the Gospel says, “the Lord knows what we need” and it is more than things. In the end it is love – love for God, for neighbor, for the earth, and for all of the coming generations. May we be transformed by the Holy Spirit and in communion with all of our brothers and sisters care for all of creation until that day when we cross the threshold of death and come to see the Creator face to face and rejoice in the fulfillment of love forever.
Fr. John Michalowski, S.J.