By Fr Daniel Mwamba Mutale, SJ
Season of Creation 2025 • Peace with Creation
The Season of Creation 2025 invites Jesuits and collaborators across Africa and Madagascar to reflect deeply on our shared ecological mission and to engage in concrete, faith-inspired action.
This year’s observance is especially significant as it marks the 10th anniversary of a landmark encyclical, Laudato Si’ — a prophetic call to care for our common home and to pursue ecological conversion through action, reflection, and solidarity.
It also coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, another critical milestone that reminds us of the global urgency of responding to the climate crisis with justice and courage.
Together, these anniversaries offer a powerful moment to renew and strengthen our commitment to the Universal Apostolic Preferences, especially our call to “care for our common home” as we “walk with the excluded.”
The Theme: Peace with Creation
This year, the theme for the Season of Creation is “Peace with Creation.” This theme deeply resonates with our experience here in Africa and Madagascar, where the longing for peace — ecological, social, and political — is urgent and widespread.
In 2025, we will unite around the theme “Peace with Creation” and the symbol of the “Garden of Peace,” inspired by Isaiah 32:14–18. This image invites us to imagine and embody a world where justice and peace flow together — where ecosystems are protected, and people flourish in harmony with the Earth.
Justice: Debt, Climate, and the Poor
Our call to justice this year also includes a prophetic stand against the economic structures that perpetuate ecological and human suffering. As the climate crisis worsens, its impacts are compounded by sovereign debt burdens in many low-income countries — including those in Africa.
We join others in calling for an end to the injustice of wealth flowing from poor nations to rich lenders through debt repayments. We advocate for debt relief, fairer financial systems, and increased support for poor and marginalised communities facing the harshest impacts of climate change.
Concrete Invitations for 2025
- Raise Awareness: Use media, parish bulletins, schools, and community platforms to share the message.
- Celebrate the Eucharist for the Care of Creation: Preach and pray with Laudato Si’ themes.
- Integrate Creation Care in Prayer & Groups: Examen, faith-sharing, retreats, novenas.
- Visible Action: Tree planting, clean-up efforts, water stewardship, and discouraging single-use plastics.
“The fruit of justice will be peace; its effect will be quietness and confidence forever.” (cf. Isaiah 32:17)
Let us seize this moment — united by faith, inspired by hope, and driven by justice — to act together with and for all of creation.