Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for creation with Latin prayers in Castel Gandolfo gardens

 

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for the Care of Creation at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. / Credit: Vatican Media

Vatican City, Jul 9, 2025 / 14:03 pm (CNA).

It was a mix of liturgical old and new in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday as Pope Leo XIV inaugurated a special Mass for the Care of Creation — with key portions in the ancient language of Latin.

Against a backdrop of green foliage and a large sculpture of Mary at the pope’s traditional summer residence, the pontiff prayed July 9 for more people to be converted from “the excesses of the human being, with his style of life,” which he said was a major cause of the many natural disasters taking place around the world.

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for the Care of Creation at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Credit: Vatican Media
Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for the Care of Creation at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Credit: Vatican Media

“We should pray for the conversion of many people, in and outside of the Church, who still do not recognize the urgency of caring for creation, for our common home,” he said, adding that the world is burning both because of global warming and armed conflicts.

The pope also emphasized “the indestructible alliance between Creator and creatures,” which he said “mobilizes our intelligence and our efforts, so that evil may be turned into good, injustice into justice, greed into communion.”

The open-air celebration was likely the first use of the prayers and scriptural readings specified for the new Mass formulary. Inspired by Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical Laudato Si’, the “Mass for the Care of Creation” was presented at the Vatican on July 3.

The Mass, attended by around 50 people involved in the Castel Gandolfo-based environmental center Borgo Laudato Si’, was celebrated in Italian but with Leo reciting certain prayers, including the collect and prayer over the offerings, in Latin.

The Borgo Laudato Si’ is an initiative to put into practice the principles for integral development outlined in Pope Francis’ environmental encyclical Laudato Si’.

Pope Leo XIV poses with visitors at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Credit: Vatican Media
Pope Leo XIV poses with visitors at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Credit: Vatican Media

Archbishop Vittorio Francesco Viola, secretary of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, told CNA by phone after the Mass that Pope Leo recited the prayers in Latin because that is how they appear in the “typical edition,” meaning the approved original, while official translations have not yet been created.

“Pope Leo is absolutely familiar with Latin; it’s certainly not a problem,” the No. 2 at the Vatican’s liturgy office added.

Pope Leo gave some insight into his personal experience with the Latin language during a meeting with hundreds of children on July 3, when he explained that he was exposed to the universal language of the Church as an altar server from around age 6, when he would serve at 6:30 a.m. Mass every day before school.

“Then it was in Latin; we still had to learn Latin for Mass, and then it changed to English,” he said. “But it wasn’t so much the language [the Mass] was celebrated in, but rather having that experience of meeting other young people who served Mass together, the friendship always, and then this closeness to Jesus in the Church.”

Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for the Care of Creation at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Credit: Vatican Media
Pope Leo XIV celebrates Mass for the Care of Creation at Castel Gandolfo on Wednesday, July 9, 2025. Credit: Vatican Media

The pope celebrated the Mass of Care for Creation July 9 during a planned two-week stay at the pontifical estate, located in the lakeside town of Castel Gandolfo, 18 miles southeast of Rome. The period of limited private and public engagements, which comes just two months into his pontificate, will end July 20.

Pope Leo has revived the 400-year tradition of papal vacationing at Castel Gandolfo, a practice eschewed by Pope Francis.

Starting his homily for the July 9 Mass on the estate’s gardens with a few improvised comments, the pontiff invited “everyone, beginning with myself, to experience that which we are celebrating in the beauty of what you could say is a ‘natural’ cathedral, with the plants and many elements of creation which they have brought here for us to celebrate the Eucharist, which means, render thanks to the Lord.”

He pointed to a reflection pool in front of the altar and recalled a practice in the first centuries of Christianity of having the faithful enter a church by passing through a baptismal font.

Leo joked that he would not want to be baptized in that specific water, which featured waterlilies and appeared to be green with algae, but he said the “symbol of passing through the water to all be washed of our sins, of our weaknesses, and so be able to enter into the great mystery of the Church is something that we experience even today.”

Viola, who was present at Leo’s Mass, noted the significance of the location, immersed in the beautiful gardens at a site of prayer for some of Leo’s predecessors.

“The place where [the Mass] was celebrated was not chosen by chance, because it is the place where several pontiffs stopped to pray during their periods of rest in Castel Gandolfo, before that image of the Virgin Mary,” he explained.

Viola called it “a place that has always preserved a dimension of prayer and the prayer of the popes. And so gathering in that place was significant, as if to preserve the heart of [Borgo Laudato Si’] that is being built on the indications of Laudato Si’, which is a heart of spirituality.”

Pope Leo, reflecting on the Gospel passage read at Mass — Jesus’ calming of the storm at sea — said the Lord’s disciples, “at the mercy of the storm, gripped by fear,” could not yet profess knowledge of Jesus as heard in the first reading, from St. Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, that “he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth.”

“We today,” the pontiff added, “in the faith that has been passed on to us, can instead continue: ‘He is also the head of the body, the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that in all things he might have preeminence.’”

“These are words that commit us throughout history, that make us a living body, the body of which Christ is the head. Our mission to protect creation, to bring it peace and reconciliation, is his own mission: the mission that the Lord has entrusted to us,” he said.


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1 Comment

  1. Critics of Laudato Si, as I am to some extent, will likely be displeased by the new formulary used by Pope Leo XIV, whether conducted in Latin or not.

    Publication of LAUDATO SI was accelerated in order to participate in (or influence… choose one) the politics of the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. The encyclical is overly long and not sufficiently edited, e.g., on one page it speaks of “reversing” climate change (n. 167) as if the problem is primarily anthropogenic; at another it speaks of “adapting” to such change (n. 170).

    But, overall, the thesis correctly questions the CULTURAL TRAJECTORY which holds that the spreading of technocracy and affluence will solve the crisis of being expelled from “the Garden” and Hobbes war of all against all (The Leviathan, 1651). Is it possible to consider the reality of ecological boundaries, that while God is infinite, his creation is not? Might we be overshooting a sustainable carrying capacity, however this might be scientifically identified in precise particulars?

    Might we even think generally of our atmosphere and oceans as a global amniotic sac such that fetal infanticide and alleged global ecocide are borne of the same loss of innocence? Did the scientist/rationalist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) point us into a box canyon when he famously tutored us to induce nature—as a sort of harem—to betray her secrets so that they could be used for technical domination over nature as well as over each other (the bomb) and ourselves (the pill)…

    POPE LEO XIV refers to the world “burning both because of global warming and armed conflicts.” Not a direct quote, so perhaps he means “climate change” rather than the earlier slogan “global warming” which was loaded with politicized finger pointing.
    What we have here, scientifically, might be a GALILEO MOMENT calling for clarity and precision in thought and wording. Even the terms “integral ecology” (Laudato Si, in the hand of ghost writer Cardinal Fernandez) or “integral human development” can exasperate, since the first is a conflation of the distinct “human ecology” and the interrelated “natural ecology,” and the latter tends to blur Jacques Maritain’s original “integral humanism” meaning “man in all his natural grandeur and weakness”—the whole person and every person (Integral Humanism, 1936; The Range of Reason, 1952).

    The value of LATIN is not traditionalism, but that the meanings of words do not change. In trying to reestablish Latin in his domain, Charlemagne falsely thought that God could hear only those prayers stated in Latin. The Chinese emperor got it right when asked what he would do to save his nation: “I would restore the meaning of words.”

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