As Christians around the world enter the 2026 Season of Creation, Catholic Climate Covenant and Laudato Si’ Movement – North America invite Catholics and all people of faith to immerse themselves in the living waters of God’s creation — and to allow those waters to transform our hearts, communities, and world.
The Season of Creation is celebrated each year from September 1, the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation, through October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. It is a time when Christians of many traditions come together in prayer and action for our common home.
This year’s theme, “Living Water,” draws from the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of a life-giving river flowing from God’s sanctuary:
“Wherever the river flows, everything will live.”
— Ezekiel 47:9
In Ezekiel’s vision, water brings life to barren places. It restores damaged ecosystems, renews communities, and makes flourishing possible. The image speaks powerfully to our own moment, when water is both a source of life and a growing source of suffering and conflict.
Across the world, communities are experiencing devastating floods, intensifying droughts, polluted waterways, disappearing glaciers, rising seas, and growing threats to access to clean and safe water. These impacts fall most heavily on people who are already vulnerable, including communities experiencing poverty and those who have contributed least to the climate crisis.
We have seen this reality in recent disasters, including catastrophic flooding in Nepal’s Himalayan region. We have also seen it in communities across the United States and around the world that have endured hurricanes, floods, wildfires, drought, and extreme heat. These events remind us that water connects us all. What happens to rivers, glaciers, wetlands, oceans, and watersheds ultimately affects the whole human family.
Across the United States, we are also seeing the significant use and abuse of water in the current building and operation of data centers, which require clean water but create deeply contaminated by-products. In many places, people are struggling to get the clean water they need to live.
As Catholics, we understand that creation is not merely a collection of resources for human use. Creation is a gift from God, a community of life in which we are deeply interconnected. Pope Francis called us in Laudato Si’ to hear both “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” That call remains urgent!
This year, a collaborative effort is underway so that the whole Church may better hear these cries: the Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor Synodal Sessions. We invite all Catholics to gather with their leaders and frontline community members to hear and respond to these cries in a Spirit-led manner.
The 2026 Season of Creation invites us to go deeper — to be immersed in living water. It is an invitation to ecological conversion: to allow God to change how we see creation, how we live, and how we respond to the suffering of our neighbors and our common home.
Ecological conversion cannot stop with personal reflection. Prayer must flow into action.
During this Season of Creation, we invite Catholics, parishes, schools, religious communities, families, and Catholic institutions to:
- Pray for the healing of creation and for communities suffering from environmental devastation.
- Contemplate the gift of water and recognize our dependence on the rivers, lakes, aquifers, glaciers, wetlands, and oceans that sustain life.
- Encounter people and communities on the front lines of the climate and ecological crises, listen to their experiences, and learn from their wisdom.
- Act to protect water, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, restore ecosystems, and care for the most vulnerable.
- Advocate for policies that protect creation, safeguard clean water, advance climate justice, and uphold the dignity of every human person.
- Commit our Catholic communities to becoming places where care for creation is woven into worship, education, investment, facilities, service, and public witness.
The Catholic community in the United States is also encouraging leaders to help organize a Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor Synodal Listening Session within their local communities. These sessions bring together Church leaders with young people and representatives from the immigrant and environmentally impacted communities. They are intended to contribute to a wider understanding of our need to be better caretakers of God’s creation and contribute to an educational campaign designed around synodal listening session reports from around the country. To learn more, click this link.
Catholic Climate Covenant and Laudato Si’ Movement – North America are committed to accompanying Catholics on this journey. Through formation, prayer, advocacy, community engagement, and practical resources, we seek to help the Church move from concern to conversion and from conversion to action.
This Season of Creation, may we allow ourselves to be changed by the living water of God’s love. May our prayers flow into compassion. May our compassion flow into solidarity. May our solidarity flow into action. And may our action help restore the waters and lands entrusted to our care.
The river in Ezekiel’s vision grows deeper as it flows. So, too, may our commitment to care for creation deepen until our communities become places where all people and all creation can flourish.
A Prayer for the Season of Creation
God of all creation,
source of every river and every living thing,
you call us into relationship with one another
and with the Earth, our common home.
Pour your living water upon us.
Renew our hearts where they have grown indifferent.
Heal the wounds we have inflicted upon your creation.
Give courage to communities facing floods, drought, pollution,
extreme weather, and the loss of the lands and waters they call home.
Teach us to recognize water as a gift,
not merely as a resource;
creation as a sacred trust,
not merely as property;
and our neighbors as brothers and sisters,
not strangers.
Make us instruments of your healing.
May our prayer lead to action,
our action to justice,
and our pursuit of justice to a world
where your creation can flourish.
May the river of your love flow through us
until, as the prophet promises,
“everything will live.”
We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Resources
- Check out Catholic Climate Covenant’s Season of Creation resource page
- Check out Laudato Si’ Movement’s Season of Creation resource page
- Check out the Covenant’s Feast of St. Francis program
- Check out Season of Creation’s website
- Check out the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Season of Creation resources page
