di Tamara Pastorelli
On Tuesday, 7 October 2025, Loppiano will host the event ‘Through the Eyes of Francis’ to celebrate the 800th anniversary of St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures.
Martedì 7 ottobre 2025
On Tuesday 7 October 2025, Loppiano will host the event ‘Through the Eyes of Francis’, designed to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the composition of the Canticle of the Creatures by St. Francis of Assisi, considered one of the first literary and poetic documents of the Italian peninsula. According to tradition, it was written a few months after he received the stigmata, while he was in the monastery of San Damiano, where Clare and her first sisters lived.
The Missa pro custodia creationis
The evening will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Maria Theotokos Shrine with the Missa pro custodia creationis, or ‘Mass for the Care of Creation,’ celebrated according to the new Roman Missal approved by Pope Leo XIV last July on the tenth anniversary of the publication of the Encyclical Laudato Si’. The ‘Missa,’ as Cardinal Michael Czerny SJ, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development (DSSUI), explained, ‘calls us to be faithful stewards of what God has entrusted to us in our daily choices and public policies, as well as in prayer, worship, and the way we live in the world.’
A reinterpretation of the Canticle of the Creatures
The programme will continue at 8:45 p.m. in the Auditorium with a reinterpretation of the Canticle by economist and writer Luigino Bruni. His analysis will focus in particular on verses 23 and 24, dedicated to the theme of forgiveness:
‘Praised be You, my Lord, for those who forgive for Your love
and bear infirmity and tribulation.’
The event, organised in collaboration with the office for ecumenism of the Diocese of Fiesole and the Circolo Laudato si’ di San Giovanni Valdarno, is part of the initiatives dedicated to the Season of Creation 2025, entitled “Peace with Creation”. Peace, also understood as forgiveness, is a fundamental part of the spirit of the Canticle, as philologist Roberto Antonelli recalls in his essay “Francesco D’Assisi” (La poesia del Duecento e Dante, La Nuova Italia, pp. 69-72). In it, Francis sings of “the inevitability of harmony in the universe, the goodness of all creation and therefore the love that, through nature and its gifts, connects man to God even in the least happy aspects […]. An almost necessary corollary of this cosmological harmony is harmony among men and women, peace, forgiveness and therefore the importance of humility”.
