Praise be You, my Lord, with all Your creatures,
especially Sir Brother Sun,
Who is the day and through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor;
and bears a likeness of You, Most High One.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,
in heaven You formed them clear and precious and beautiful.

If you are close to a member of the Franciscan family, you may be familiar with these words.  And you may already know it has been 800 years since St. Francis of Assisi put them to parchment. Numerous celebratory events, including conferences, musical tributes, parish days of recollection, podcasts and the publication of theological reflections have already taken place to mark this anniversary year among Franciscans and in the world at large. 

The “Canticle of the Creatures” (also known as the “Canticle of the Sun”) anticipated the image of Francis in the popular late-medieval story collection The Little Flowers of St. Francis: the humble proto-hippie of a saint whose statuary (featuring the poverello holding court with various winged and four-legged critters) adorns gardens worldwide and who inspired Franco Zeffirelli’s 1972 biopic “Brother Sun, Sister Moon.” The familiar hymn “All Creatures of Our God and King” is also fashioned from the canticle’s verses, paying homage to the elements of God’s creation, and it moved Franz Liszt to compose a suite for solo piano. More recently, Pope Francis alluded to the canticle in his 2015 encyclical, known in English as “On Care for Our Common Home.” The pope borrowed St. Francis’ repeated refrain of “Praise be to you, Lord…,” preserving the Umbrian Italian dialect in which it was composed: Laudato si’.

Given the current state of that creation and the creatures that inhabit this little earthly portion of it, we might expect a variety of responses to the Franciscan celebrations. Consider two of the more prominent options.

One: Great! This couldn’t have come at a better time! The world’s climate is at its most precarious state since humans entered the picture. We have just experienced the two warmest years the planet has known in this geological epoch. Wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes compete for news headlines. The struggle to avert the worst-case scenarios of climate change has been dealt another blow by the United States abandoning its leadership position and becoming a fossil-fuel-burning pariah state. The wisdom of St. Francis is just what we need at this moment to galvanize a struggling climate movement and turn our attention toward what is really at stake. 

A statue of St. Francis of Assisi, patron of animals and the environment, outside a Maryland animal hospital. (CNS photo/Bob Roller)

The anniversary of the “Canticle of the Creatures” can, in this optimistic take, also inspire the church’s new shepherd, Pope Leo XIV, to take up the vision of his predecessor, St. Francis’ namesake, and motivate citizens of post-industrial nations to reconsider their consumption habits and the economic systems they have taken for granted. Celebrating the canticle today can trigger a rejuvenation of environmental awareness for the planet’s next 800 years.

A second possible response: Oh, great. Could this have come at a worse time? The world’s climate is at its most precarious state since humans entered the picture. We have just experienced the two warmest years the planet has known in this geological epoch….

The gloomier take suggests that commemorating a centuries-old verse could be just another opportunity to retreat to an interior world of private prayer, of misplaced satisfaction in taking time to express “care for creation” without ever doing anything to transform ourselves or the political-economic systems in which we operate.

Two observations speak for this more pessimistic take on the canticle celebrations.

First, there is no averting a crisis at this point; it is already here and we saw it coming. We will almost certainly surpass the average temperature increases that were projected as worst-case scenarios a generation ago. The world’s marginalized will feel the effects first and in a deadly way, while people in developed nations may continue to kick the can down the road—until weather extremes make things like food and home insurance unaffordable for even the middle and upper classes.

Second, there is no going back to the bucolic nature of a pre-industrial world. St. Francis lived six centuries before the Industrial Revolution began reshaping the planet, and the natural world he knew has been fundamentally transformed since fossil fuels became the economy’s power source. This is hardly an epiphany that had to wait for the digital age to emerge; philosophers as early as the 19th century recognized that what we call “nature” was already becoming more of a social category than mere wilderness—little of which industrialism would leave intact anyway.  Some scientists in fact suggest we have exited the Holocene era and entered the “Anthropocene”—the first geological epoch where human activity has left a measurable (and decidedly adverse) mark on the planet. 

Nature, then and now

However enchanted our predecessors considered God’s creation to be, we no longer have the luxury of romanticizing it. The goal is to reanimate it in ways that bring it—and the creatures that dwell therein—back to a state where all can thrive. But that “thriving” will be on a planet that looks and feels nothing like the planet St. Francis of Assisi trod in the 13th century.

The Franciscan vision—encompassing the “Canticle of the Creatures” as well as St. Francis’ other writings—is better sustained and honored not by simply curating a tradition and venerating it in its original context (or, worse, in no context at all) but rather by prophetically applying it to the present situation. What does the canticle call us to do now, in this world, where the radiance of “Brother Sun” is trapped by our CO2 emissions to harmful effect, where “Brother Wind” is tearing people’s homes and businesses off of their foundations, and where “Sister Water” is in precious short supply for some populations while abundant to dangerous excess for others?

As a professed Franciscan in the Order of Friars Minor, I would love to celebrate this anniversary along with those who say, “This couldn’t have come at a better time!” But as a longtime climate activist—one as continuously frustrated by well-meaning but merely feel-good forms of environmentalism as by persistent climate denialism—the cynicism of “Could this have come at a worse time?” resonates just as much.

Yes, honor the 800th anniversary of the “Canticle of the Creatures” along with the Franciscan family. But do it in the true spirit of St. Francis of Assisi and the 21st-century pope who took his name in homage: Our focus cannot be solely on a premodern idyll of “nature.” We must also resist the powers of this world, whose reckless pursuit of profit margins and shareholder value threatens to turn Sister Earth into a wasteland unfit for the forms of life that St. Francis so cherished. That includes, most notably, us. 

Edward Tverdek, O.F.M., is the director of the Ockham Center (ockhamcenter.org) and a priest at St. Peter’s Church in downtown Chicago. He is the author of The Moral Weight of Ecology (Lexington, 2015), as well as numerous essays and articles on environmental politics and policy.