Welcome to the Archdiocesan Care for Creation Team Earth Day Prayer Vigil

All participants will be muted during this prayer vigil. Thank you for joining our celebration today! We will begin in just a few minutes!

Introduction and Welcome

A warm welcome to all who are on the call today. These are challenging times and we pray with you for God’s grace and strength. The Covid-19 crisis is happening alongside the climate crisis. This Archdiocesan Earth Day Vigil is meant to raise awareness of the urgent need to care for our Earth and our vulnerable brothers and sisters. We are all connected.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. This year also marks the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si, Care for Our Common Home.

Let us begin our vigil of prayer, readings, reflection, and action.

Opening PrayerO Creator,

Our world is large, and yet your Creation is so fragile.

We glimpse the needs of our common home, of our sisters and brothers, and those needs are great.

We want to turn away, but you call us back.

We want simple solutions, but you want us to help solve the complex problems.

Through your Church, you call us to listen, to learn, to reflect and to act.

Give us a deep sense of our place in this web of Creation.

Give us the wisdom of mind and generosity of heart to seek your will in the world today. Inspire us to respond to the call to live in solidarity with all of your Creation, so that the Earth, and all children of God might live in dignity and peace.

Amen.

Education for Justice staff. Copyright © Reprinted with permission)

Nicholas Black Elk

Nicholas Black Elk was a Lakota holy man and a Catholic Catechist. He was born in 1863 and died in 1950 at the age of 86. He was present for the Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Massacre of Wounded Knee. He was a holy man of the Oglala

Lakota people and became a Catholic in 1904. He has recorded much of Lakota spirituality in several books and has

worked with several Jesuits to identify the similarities of Lakota spirituality and the Catholic faith. He is currently up for

canonization with the Catholic faith.

Nicholas Black Elk Reading

• We offer this reflection by Black Elk which exemplifies a Lakota Spiritual concept Mitakuye Oyasin, All My Relations giving us some insight to the theme: All are Connected.

• Holding the pipe up with its stem to the heavens, she (White Buffalo Calf Woman) said: “With this sacred pipe you will walk upon the Earth; for the Earth is your Grandmother and Mother, and She is sacred. Every step that is taken upon Her should be as a prayer. The bowl of this pipe is of red stone; it is the Earth. Carved in the stone and facing the center is this buffalo calf who represents all the four-leggeds who live upon your Mother.”

Nicholas Black Elk Reading

• “The stem of the pipe is of wood, and this represents all that grows upon the Earth. And these twelve feathers which hang here where the stem fits into the bowl are from Wanbli Galeshka, the Spotted Eagle, and they represent the eagle and all the wingeds of the air. All these peoples, and all the things of the universe, are joined to you who smoke the pipe—all send their voices to Wakan-Tanka, the Great Spirit. When you pray with this pipe, you pray for and with everything.”

• "The Gift of the Sacred Pipe: Based on Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux" Louise Drysdale and Joseph EpesBrown pp. 5-7 in 1953 edition

Refrain after Reading

Pope Francis from Laudato Si

“The urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development.... Humanity still has the ability to work together in building our common home. Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded.” (Laudato Si 13)

Pope Francis from Laudato Si

“I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet. We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all.” (Laudato Si 14)Laudato Si, © Copyright - Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015

Refrain after Reading

A Reading from The Gospel of Luke

Luke 12: 26-28

26 If then you cannot do even a very little thing, why do you worry about other matters? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. 28 But if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you?

New American Standard Revised, USCCB, 2011

Refrain after Reading

Pope Francis Interview

•Pope Francis: There is an expression in Spanish: “God always forgives, we forgive sometimes, but nature never forgives.” We did not respond to the partial catastrophes. Who now speaks of the fires in Australia, or remembers that eighteen months ago a boat could cross the North Pole because the glaciers had all melted? Who speaks now of the floods? I don’t know if these are the revenge of nature, but they are certainly nature’s responses.

Pope Francis Interview

•You ask me about conversion. Every crisis contains both danger and opportunity: the opportunity to move out from the danger. Today I believe we have to slow down our rate of production and consumption (Laudato si’, 191) and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world. We need to reconnect with our real surroundings. This is the opportunity for conversion.

• Commonweal Magazine, Austen Ivereigh, 2020

Refrain

Pledge for Vigil

• Answering Pope Francis’ urgent call in Laudato Si, I pledge to:

• Pray for and with creation• Live more simply• Advocate to protect our common home.

• Taken from http://livelaudatosi.org/• You can follow this website if you want to connect with this organization and

take the pledge there.

Minnesota Action Steps

• Please go to www.centerformission.org/downloads for more information about action steps which you can do to better protect the environment.

Closing Prayer

O God, your creative love brought forth our world,

Once a garden where humans could taste and see beauty and goodness.

But our eyes do not always see the sacredness of Creation.

We do not always remember that it is Gift Given so that all humans may live and flourish.

Inattention can change the world. Even mighty glaciers weep now.

Lifestyles create pollution that blot out the sun.

The very skies above us are threatened.

Seas rise and whole peoples lose their homes.

Closing Prayer

O God, we ask you to Call us to renewal and to stewardship.

Call us to solidarity with the earth and all its creatures.

Give us new vision to see the fragile beauty that remains with us.

Give us new spiritual energy to become active in loving the world through our daily lives,

Give us new voices to speak out for environmental solidarity.

Bless us with a love of your Creation

So that we may glimpse your Eden once again.(Adapted from a prayer by Jane Deren, Education for Justice. Copyright © Reprinted with permission)

Planning Team

• This program was planned by volunteers and lay staff from these organizations and parishes:

• Center for Mission

• Gichitwaa Kateri

• Saint Dominic

• Saint Frances Cabrini

• Saint Joan of Arc

• Saint Joseph New Hope

Planning Team Cont.

• Saint Joseph’s, Red Wing

• Saint Maximilian Kolbe

• Saint Thomas More

• Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet and Consociates

• Thank you to all of our volunteers and lay staff for making this event possible!

• For more information, email Adam Fitzpatrick (fitzpatricka@archspm.org )