Season of Creation 2025
September 1st - October 4th

From the World Day of Prayer for Creation through to the Feast of St Francis of Assisi

The Season of Creation is a time for Christians to come together in prayer and action for Creation.

To mark this year’s Season of Creation, the Lead Bishop for the Environment for the Bishops’ Conference, Bishop John Arnold, has called for Catholics in England and Wales to take action to address the environmental crises of our times. This action, he says, needs to take place at every level in society – from the personal to the parish, in politics and in business.

Bishop Arnold also urges Catholics and people of goodwill to be challenged by Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical letter on Care for our Common Home, Laudato Si, to change our lifestyles, build healthy communities, and to educate ourselves and others on integral ecology – the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world.

In this Season of Creation, we acknowledge that You care for all Your creation; give us the strength to faithfully care for all of our world; may we find peaceful ways of interaction with our world, so that all creatures may flourish; and especially when we feel overwhelmed or anxious, let us be restored by contemplating the beauty all around us; help us to work for a just and peaceful future, for humanity and all God's creation. Amen.

The Season of Creation is marked throughout the Christian world from 1 September to 4 October (Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi) and celebrates the joy of creation as well as encouraging awareness-raising initiatives to protect the natural environment.

The Season of Creation has a special significance for the Catholic Church, particularly since the late Pope Francis established 1 September as an annual World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.

“Future generations will never forgive us if we miss the opportunity to protect our common home. We have inherited a garden; we must not leave a desert for our children.” Joint statement from Pope Francis, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury.

This year’s Season of Creation has as its theme “Peace with Creation”, inspired by the passage from Isaiah 32:14-18; “My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.”

In a world of challenges and division, marked by war and climate change, how can we as people of faith create and work towards peace with creation?

Our Bishops ask us to spend particular time in prayer and reflection on this question during the next five weeks and it is our hope that during this time we as Catholic Communities of Faith and as People of Hope might meet together, talk together and pray together for “Peace with Creation”.

From the Irish Catholic Bishops Conference website (mildly edited)