Pope Francis has designated September 1 as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.
Pope Francis said he was instituting the prayer day for Catholics because he shares the concern of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who initiated a similar prayer day for the Orthodox Church in 1989.
The day of prayer, the Pope said, will give individuals and communities an opportunity to implore God’s help in protecting creation and an opportunity to ask God’s forgiveness “for sins committed against the world in which we live”.
The suggestion to have Catholics and Orthodox praying for such a cause on the same day came from Metropolitan John of Pergamon
The Metropolitan represented Patriarch Bartholomew at the public presentation on June 18 of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’.