Catholic priests will now be able to celebrate Mass “for the care of creation” after the Vatican announced that a new formulary of prayers and biblical readings for the Mass will be added to the Roman Missal. Source: OSV News.
The new formulary, or specific set of texts and prayers for Mass, will be added among the “civil needs” section of the “Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Occasions” listed in the Roman Missal, which is the liturgical book that contains the texts for celebrating Mass in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church.
Pope Leo XIV will use the new formulary for a private Mass on Wednesday with the staff of Borgo Laudato Si’ ecology project – a space for education and training in integral ecology hosted in the gardens of the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo, the traditional summer residence for the Popes.
The formulary for the Mass began development during Pope Francis’s pontificate in response to “requests for a liturgical way of celebrating the meaning and the message of Laudato Si’,” Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, said when presenting the new formulary at a press conference last week.
“The true authors of this text are Scripture, the (Church) fathers and Laudato Si’,” Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, said.
The new formulary, Archbishop Viola said, “receives some of the principal themes contained in Laudato Si’ and expresses them in the form of prayer within the theological framework that the encyclical revives.”
He described the set of prayers as “a good antidote against a certain reading of Laudato Si’ that risks reducing the depth of its content to a ‘superficial or ostensible ecology’” that is “far from that integral ecology widely described and explained in the encyclical”.
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Church adds Mass ‘for care of creation’ to missal, Pope to celebrate (By Justin McLellan, CNS)
