“This initiative truly touches my heart.” Margaret Karram returns to the Holy City, where she lived for 24 years, to take part in the inauguration of the ‘Within Your Gates’ Forum, organised by Patriarch Pierbattista Pizzaballa and the University of Notre Dame. The forum aims to be an open space for religious leaders, academics, and civic actors across different communities, to meet and work together. The objective is ambitious and necessary: to restore Jerusalem’s universal mission as a city of reconciliation and peace for all humanity.
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Kalera is a small village in Upper Katanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the birthplace of Abbot Jean Baptiste Ilunga Binsela, a priest and animator of the Laudato Sì Movement.
The region is extraordinarily rich in minerals such as cobalt and coltan, resources that power technologies and economies around the world. Yet, Jean Baptiste grew up in a very different reality. His village had no electricity, little sanitation facilities, limited access to water and other services and no local schools or adequate roads. Over the years, the community has endured repeated flooding.
Jean Baptiste left Kalera to continue his studies and become a priest. Then he returned to the village where, in 2023, something began to change.
Through his formation as an animator of the Laudato Sì Movement, Jean Baptiste deepened his understanding of the central messages of the encyclical:
Everything is interconnected: faith and creation, poverty and energy, human dignity and the economy, the minerals beneath the earth and the lives of the people who live above them.
This ecological conversion led Jean Baptiste to ask a difficult question: how could a community surrounded by resources that help power the world, remain without energy itself?
His response reminds us that conversion cannot simply remain a personal spiritual experience.
Living Water is meant to flow: it flows when contemplation becomes compassion, when faith helps us see the connections between the Earth and the people who depend on it and when that awareness leads us to action.
In Kalera, that flow took the form of renewable energy. Jean Baptiste started working towards achieving a fossil fuel free village. The installation of solar energy gradually opened up new possibilities. Children can now study after sunset. Families can charge their phones and stay connected. The local health centre can refrigerate medicines. The Chapel of Sant’Annarita has electricity, strengthening the pastoral life of the community.
For the people of Kalera these changes seemed almost miraculous. Jean Baptiste says they even began comparing their village to Capernaum, remembered in the Gospel as a place of healing and transformation.
Solar energy brought light. But something deeper also began to flow: hope.
When inner conversion extends outwards, in fact, it can nourish relationships, restore dignity, strengthen communities and open up new possibilities in places that have been forgotten.
The story of Jean Baptiste is one small stream flowing into in a much larger river. Around the world, many communities are finding their own way to immerse themselves in Living Water, helping to increase a river that brings healing, unity and hope to our common home in this Season of Creation 2026.
The Focolare Movement is a partner of the Laudato SìMovement. The Season of Creation began in 1989 on the initiative of the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I, who established the Day of Prayer for Creation on 1st September. In 2007, the Third European Ecumenical Assembly extended this celebration into a month-long period ending on 4th October, the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Finally, in 2015, Pope Francis officially added the observance to the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, consolidating its global ecumenical character. In 2026, several Churches included the new feast, the “Feast of Creation in Christ” (Creation Sunday) in their liturgical calendar. Pope Leo XIV has approved a “Mass for the Care of Creation” for 1st September, the beginning of the Season of Creation.
Ahead of the 11th World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation celebrated on 1st September, Pope Leo XIV has written a message entitled “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks” (Is 2,4).
It is a text to be read again and again and meditated on, starting from the title that takes up one of the most famous images of the Bible. Isaiah imagines that an object made for war is transformed into an agricultural tool. What was once used to destroy becomes a tool for producing and sustaining life. It is a beautiful image of peace and one that is closely connected to the present day. Today, fragile relationships and armed conflicts continue to destroy the environment and threaten the lives of millions of people.
Pope Leo highlights the deep link between peace, care for Creation and human dignity, inviting us to direct resources towards life and sustainability. The Pope writes. “But today, we too often witness the very opposite, as violence and war. War also leaves behind social and ecological destruction that endures for generations. Moreover, the interaction between armed conflicts and environmental degradation often creates a vicious cycle, which destroys ecosystems, contaminates essential resources, such as air and water, and undermines food security. This fuels poverty, inequality, and new social tensions that can contribute to the emergence of further conflicts.”
Creation is “nature”, everything that surrounds us! And human beings are not merely observers, but part of it. Isaiah’s hope therefore becomes for us today a call to “transform what is evil into life“. This conversion that cannot be separated from returning not only to our hearts, but to the One who heals them: the Lord. For where the individual is renewed, new possibilities open up.
The Pope says, “What has been used for destruction can be redirected towards life, towards the care of the poor, the nourishment of the hungry and the safeguarding of creation.. This is the path of an authentic ecological conversion, where the effects of our encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in our relationships with the world around us. Peace, then, begins in the heart and flows outwards to our relationships, communities and the broader world.”
Every year, 1st September also marks the beginning of the Season of Creation, the ecumenical journey of prayer and commitment to the care of our Common House which concludes on 4th October, the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. During this time, the Church, together with other Christian communities, is invited to renew its commitment to Creation, letting itself be guided by prayer, conversion and concrete gestures of care. This year’s theme, “Living Water,” explores Ezekiel 47:9 and 12 as a powerful biblical vision of hope and ecological healing. The image of living water flowing from God’s sanctuary symbolizes divine healing that regenerates.
The commitment of the Focolare communities around the world
The Season of Creation is also expressed through concrete actions. Among the many initiatives in different parts of the world, we highlight two from Latin America: Brazil and Uruguay.
In Brazil, the Decarbonize project is transforming schools into places where young people can learn about, understand and respond concretely to the environmental challenges of our time.
Students and teachers are involved in a programme of education on climate change, sustainability and environmental justice, developing not only knowledge, but also the ability to participate and take responsibility in their own communities.
The initiative grew out of the international “Decarbonize” program of the Global Education Centre, carried out in collaboration with the University of Alberta, Canada. The programme focuses on youth leadership, climate justice, the fight against environmental racism and political participation, in line with the 2030 Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Earth Charterand human rights.
The young people do not simply listen or study: they carry out research, share what they have discovered and participate in public life.
The experience became even more meaningful when students had the opportunity to participate in institutional events such as COP conferences, the Brazilian National Congress and state legislative assemblies.
Decarbonize therefore shows that educating for sustainability also means giving young people a voice, the tools and confidence, to become active citizens and protagonists in caring for our common home.
In Uruguay, a few kilometers from Montevideo, the experience of the El Pelícano Mariapolis Centre offers a practical and engaging way to educate people about integral ecology. The centre, born out of the experience of the Focolare Movement, is surrounded by nature and offers children a space where the natural world becomes a place of learning and discovery. Through outdoor educational activities, children can come into contact with the environment, observing it, getting to know it and learning to respect it.
In 2022, thisexperience took a further step forward thanks to the project “El Pelícano: Centro de Recursos Ecologico para la Educación en la Infancia” (The Pelican: Ecological Resource Center for Early Childhood Education), supported through the New HumanitySeed FundingProgram.
The aim is to transform El Pelícano into a resource centre for the environmental education of children. Workshops, nature excursions, an organic vegetable garden and recycling activities become opportunities to learn through doing. A child who cultivates a vegetable garden, observes a plant, walks in the woods or learns to give new life to a waste material is not only acquiring a notion: they are building a relationship with nature.
And the experience doesn’t stop with the children. Through them, the project also aims to involve families, so that what is experienced and learned can continue in daily life.
The “El Pelicano” therefore offers us a valuable experience: ecology can be taught from early childhood through beauty, practical experience and participation, helping new generations to feel part of our Common Home and responsible for its care.
This is undoubtedly a very difficult time for humanity: wars that continue for years, polarization of every kind, vast numbers of people leaving their homelands in search of a better future that is denied them, climate change, natural disasters…
At the end of 2001, Chiara Lubich wrote this prayer to Our Lady Untier of Knots at the request of someone who had sent her a postcard of an image from an 18th-century painting housed in the church of St Peter in Augsburg. It seems to have been written for the very times the world is experiencing today.
Yesterday I experienced one of those moments that are not easily forgotten with one of my colleagues. She is a young woman who has a disabled son and a violent ex-husband with whom she is currently involved in legal proceedings.
She works very hard and I thought of giving her a financial bonus because, with great dedication, she had completed a task that I had entrusted to her. Although given her situation, she sometimes has to be absent due to the court case involving her ex-husband or to some difficulties with her son she is always willing to work. When I gave her the bonus in cash, she burst into tears. Over the weekend money had been stolen from her at a cash machine so this helped to compensate for that loss and it was a greater sum than she had lost. It gave us an opportunity to talk about Providence, Then I remembered something I had heard at an Economy of Communion meeting, namely that “we must anticipate the needs of others”. This prompted me to give her an advance on her wages which, out of humility, she did not dare ask for. We are only stewards.
CK (Argentina) (da “Family News”)
Solidarity
I am an elderly priest collaborator in a parish in Milan, Italy. I also look after some people who are alone and in difficulty, helping them with donations that I receive.
Recently, one particular situation became more serious. I had already booked a place for a few days of summer holiday and I had set aside €140 for extra expenses. After a moment of prayer, I decided to give half of it to the person in need.
This morning, after Mass, an elderly man came up to me and gave me an envelope containing €150. Once again, I found that I was not alone in managing this solidarity.
PL (wrote to us from Milan, Italy)
Recognising one another
Some time ago I began to pay attention to those people whom few notice and whom no one even greets. One day, as I was running to catch the bus, I lost my wallet and went back to look for it. I found a street cleaner who had found it and was trying to track me down. Samuel refused to accept any reward and since then we have met many times to have a coffee.
Fatima is Moroccan, Muslim and works as a cleaner in a neighborhood restaurant. Over time she has told me many things about her family and her homeland. We have talked about beliefs, faith and respect and she demonstrates affection every time she sees me, because no one ever stops to talk “to the cleaner”.
Chaouki is a Tunisian cook who has worked in Italy and Germany, speaks many languages and is a very cultured person. He has taken over a restaurant called “Citizen of the World”: a real statement of respect and tolerance. I told him that I shared his way of thinking and that I was happy to share ideas and actions for a better world. One day I went there to have breakfast with some friends and their surprise was similar to mine in seeing people from various backgrounds who shared his outlook. It’s great to feel surrounded by good people who go about their lives without making a fuss.
