The Vatican is placing its flagship sustainability campaign, the Laudato Si’ Platform for Action, at the center of Laudato Si’ Week 2022, in hopes that a week highlighting the multi-year initiative will inspire more Catholics and church institutions to register.

From May 22-29, the now annual Laudato Si’ Week will feature eight days of events and actions marking the 2015 seventh anniversary of Pope Francis. encyclical on ecology“Laudato Si’on the care of our common home.”

An official Laudato Si’ Week program, organized by the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, will feature nine events located around the world blending virtual and in-person encounters, in the latter’s case for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020.

In addition to the official calendar, the organizers are planning hundreds of other side celebrations around the world. Themed “Listening and Journeying Together”, the week is expected to feature an ecological world tour of liturgies, actions and discussions, from Manila to Brazil to Assisi, and will also offer a glimpse of an upcoming Laudato Si’ documentary.

Francis is expected to kick off the week at his Sunday Angelus prayer May 22 in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican.

Laudato Si’ Week, now being held for the fourth time, marks the anniversary of the date (May 24) on which Francis signed the encyclical, or papal letter, his papacy’s first solo effort and the first of any pope focused primarily on issues of ecology. Since the fifth anniversary in 2020, Laudato Si’ Week has been sponsored by the Dicastery for Integral Human Development and supported by many Catholic organizations, including the Laudato Si’ Movement.

At that time, the Vatican sought to use the anniversary of the encyclical as a way to trigger action within the Catholic Church to live out the messages and teachings that Francis conveyed in Laudato Si’driven in part by the timing that scientists believe is necessary to mitigate climate change and avoid its worst impacts.

At the 2020 celebration, the Dicastery first announced plans for the Laudato Si’ Platform of Action, an ambitious grassroots initiative inviting all facets of the Catholic Church to embark on a seven-year journey towards total sustainability by carrying out a series of actions in the spirit of integral ecological solidarity. A year later, Francis personally invited Catholics to join the platform and a multi-year journey “to create the future we want: a more inclusive, fraternal, peaceful and sustainable world.”

The 2022 celebration will double those efforts.

Each day of the week will focus on one of the seven thematic goals of the Laudato Si’ Platform for Action:

• Response to the cry of the earth;
• Response to the cry of the poor;
• ecological economy;
• Adoption of sustainable lifestyles;
• environmental education;
• Ecological spirituality;
• Community resilience and empowerment.

The Dicastery hopes that Catholic institutions and individuals will take advantage of the week to learn more about the Platform for Action and ultimately to register. Registration for the first cohort group will remain open until October 4, feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. At the end of March, around 4,200 institutions and individuals joined.

“As the purchase of fossil fuels funds wars and further destroys God’s creation, our Holy Father calls us not to despair but to unite, not to mourn this destruction but to take urgent action together,” said Cardinal Michael Czerny, head of the integral. Dicastery for Human Development, said in an Earth Day message announcing Laudato Si’ Week 2022.

Salesian Fr. Joshtrom Kureethadam, head of the dicastery’s ecology sector, told EarthBeat in an email that they hope the Laudato Si’ week’s focus on the platform for action and its goals” will help bring us closer to the critical mass of people needed to shape a true ecological revolution and save our common home.”

The pope’s call for global ecological conversion is also a call for synodal conversion, he added, which begins by listening to poor and marginalized communities and the earth itself, especially in the everyone’s local space.

“Only by walking together can we take meaningful action on behalf of our common home,” Kureethadam said.

In addition to raising the profile of the Laudato Si’ Platform for Action, Laudato Si’ Week events will highlight a global celebration of Francis’ encyclical.

A May 22 prayer rally, held in Uganda, will feature the voices of people and communities on the front lines of climate change. Another liturgical celebration will take place on May 24 at the Manila Cathedral in the Philippines, which will be followed by a program showing how various communities have responded to the encyclical’s calls for integral ecology and response to the poor.

A conversation on biodiversity, ahead of the UN Convention on Biodiversity COP15 later this year, will include Salesian Sr. Alessandra Smerilli, Secretary of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva and Theresa Ardler, an Aboriginal Gweagal woman and headmistress. Gweagal cultural connections in Australia.

Other discussions will focus on the links between climate change, fossil fuels and violence, and ways for Catholics to align their finances and investments with their faith and Laudato Si’ at an event* on May 26 at An Tairseach Ecological Retreat Center in Ireland.

A Laudato Si’ festival featuring Catholic performers will take place on May 28 in Assisi, Italy, birthplace of the patron saint of ecology, St. Francis of Assisi, and the week will end the next day with a final gathering prayer group based in Brumadinho, Brazil — where a toxic waste dump in 2019 killed 270 people — it will also make the voices of those affected by climate change heard.

The idea for a multinational celebration was to show how the Catholic Church is prophetically responding to the climate emergency and ecological crises around the world, said Tomás Insua, executive director of the Laudato Si’ Movement.

“Across six continents, Catholics are taking urgent action to address the twin crises of climate change and collapsing biodiversity,” he told EarthBeat. “They are taking actions that make sense for their communities, from using sustainable transport in Europe to planting trees in Sri Lanka to holding open-air masses in Peru.”

One of the highlights of the week will take place on May 27, a day devoted to ecological education, with a preview of “L’Invitation”, a feature documentary on Laudato Si’ which represents Francis. The film, from director Nicolas Brown, is due out later this year and will be available to stream for free on YouTube Originals. Clips have previously been screened at the UN climate change summit COP26 at an event hosted by The New York Times.

Other events throughout Laudato Si’ Week will include Laudato Si’ Masses in the Archdioceses of Atlanta and Chicago, tree plantings in Uganda, a youth forum organized by Caritas Oceania, a vigil at the meeting of oil giant Shell in London and an underwater clean-up with divers in the Archdiocese of Cebu in the Philippines.

The full program of events is available at Laudato Si’ Week Website.

Kureethadam said Laudato Si’ Week is an opportunity for every person to listen to the cries of the poor and the earth, and what God is saying through them, and ultimately to do something.

“It cannot be something abstract, like a simple global event in Rome at the center of the Church, but rather something rooted in our own local communities, starting with the peripheries,” he said. he declares.

*This story has been updated to provide additional information about the May 26 event.