The Pope’s message for September 1 links war and ecological destruction, and calls for a conversion that goes deeper than policy.
Pope Leo XIV published his message for the 11th World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation on August 15, the feast of the Assumption, ahead of the observance on September 1. The message, addressed to “dear brothers and sisters,” takes as its guiding text a verse from the prophet Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Is 2:4). The annual ecological observance is this year an occasion to address war, environmental destruction, and the condition of the human heart as a single interconnected crisis.
War and ecology as one wound
The Pope opens by observing that the world is witnessing simultaneous crises — human suffering and accelerating disruption to the balance of creation — and refuses to treat them as separate problems. “These phenomena are not unrelated,” he writes. “They are a single plea for healing and peace arising from a wounded world.”
War, he argues, leaves wounds that extend far beyond the battlefield. “It claims lives, tears families apart and forces millions to flee their homes, thereby deepening fear, injustice and division.” But its damage reaches further still: “The interaction between armed conflicts and environmental degradation often creates a vicious cycle, which destroys ecosystems, contaminates essential resources, such as air and water, and undermines food security. This fuels poverty, inequality, and new social tensions that can contribute to the emergence of further conflicts.”
The Pope’s argument is that war is a political, humanitarian, and ecological catastrophe. And the ecological crisis, in turn, generates the conditions for further conflict.
The heart as the site of the crisis
Leo’s most theologically substantive move is to locate the root of both crises not in systems or structures but in the human heart. Drawing on Gaudium et Spes, he writes that the discord we see in the world — violence, injustice, ecological degradation — is “a symptom of the deeper dichotomy that is rooted in humanity itself.”
The human heart, he says, is “not merely the seat of emotion, but the center of the person — the place where reason, desire, will and conscience converge. It is here that we wrestle with the contradictory desires within us between love and indifference, truth and illusion, justice and injustice.”
He invokes Benedict XVI’s phrase from the homily for the inauguration of his pontificate in 2005: “The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast.” The implication is consistent: reform of structures will not be sufficient. What is needed is a conversion of heart.
List of the tools we need
The prophetic image of Isaiah — beating swords into plowshares — functions throughout the message not as a distant eschatological hope but as a present personal call. “It invites us to transform harm into life.” But Leo is clear that this transformation requires more than good will.
“Without this inner transformation, peace will remain fragile and short-lived. But where hearts are renewed, new possibilities begin to open. What has been used for destruction can be redirected toward life, toward the care of the poor, the nourishment of the hungry, and the safeguarding of creation.”
He names the true tools for building peace directly: “Truth, dialogue, patience, goodness, justice, mercy, understanding, care, and love. These flow from hearts shaped by the Gospel and sustained by God’s grace. Only these qualities possess the power to transform individuals, renew communities and heal the wounds of our world.”
The message closes with an invitation as concrete as it is theological: “Let us imagine a world in which the energies currently invested in war are directed toward integral human development, to overcoming poverty, protecting human dignity, and reconciling divided peoples.” And with a promise:
“If we take up this task with humility and faith, we will become collaborators in God’s work of renewal. We will move, slowly but surely, from desert to garden, from division to communion, and from violence to peace.”
The World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation was instituted by Pope Francis in 2015 and is observed ecumenically on September 1, the date chosen by the Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I for the same purpose in 1989.
