The Theological Commission proposes a “sin against creation”: what perennial doctrine says

On 2 September 2026, the first day of the “Season of Creation,” the International Theological Commission, an advisory body attached to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, made public a document entitled “Caring for our common home.” The text, 148 paragraphs long, was drawn up by a sub-commission chaired by Alenka Arko and coordinated by Msgr Piero Coda, the commission’s secretary general. It was approved by vote on 23 July 2026, submitted to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery, brought to Leo XIV on 28 July, and its publication was authorised on 21 August.

The document proposes to name ecological harm a “sin against creation and against the Creator,” in place of terms such as “ecocide” or a generic “ecological sin.” It calls for an “ecological turn,” rejects two excesses it judges unacceptable—the predatory anthropocentrism that would make man the “absolute master” of creation, and the biocentrism that excludes him from the centre—and holds to a “situated anthropocentrism” borrowed from Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica humanitas.” It warns against philosophies that, by suppressing the difference in value between the human person and other living beings, would open the way to a “new pantheism” tinged with neo-paganism. Finally it presents vegetarianism as finding in Genesis “an undeniable foothold” and asserts that “every act of purchase is a moral act,” imposing a voluntary restriction of consumption.

Creation is a gift, and the Creator alone is its end

On what creation is, doctrine is not new. The first article of the Creed confesses “God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”: by His almighty power He created out of nothing the heaven and the earth and all that they contain, and, after having created all things, He “preserveth and governeth all things.” The creature is never closed upon itself: it comes from God as a gift and refers back to Him as to the “sovereign and perfect Good.” To recognise in the world the imprint of its author is thus no recent discovery; it is the first word of the Creed.

On man’s place, Scripture is plain. “Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air”; “fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea” (Genesis I). Man is not one species among others: he is made to the image of God and set over the living. Tradition therefore holds, without hesitation, what the document calls “situated anthropocentrism”: man at the summit of the visible, but under God, accountable for his stewardship.

What accords with doctrine, and what departs from it

Where the document refuses biocentrism and ecocentrism and warns against pantheism, it recovers the faith of all time: the Creator is distinct from His creation, man is not drowned in nature, and to divinise the world is a pagan relapse. On this point we have nothing to correct and everything to approve.

The very expression “sin against creation” calls, however, for a distinction. Sin is formally an offence against God, a transgression of His law; the creature is not a third party whom one would offend alongside Him. The document itself concedes this, specifying that it is a sin “insofar as it violates the meaning of creation willed by God.” It is this second member, “against the Creator,” that carries the whole doctrine; the first, taken alone, would shift the object of sin from God toward the thing. To squander the goods entrusted to us is a sin, not because nature would be wronged in a right, but because avarice, intemperance and the wanton destruction of God’s gifts offend Him who made them. Tradition condemned this already, and without a new word.

There remains the point where the text plainly departs. To make vegetarianism a doctrine resting on Genesis contradicts Genesis itself: after the flood, God says to Noah, “every thing that moveth, and liveth shall be meat for you: even as the green herbs have I delivered them all to you” (Genesis IX). And the Apostle warns that in “the last times” some will command “to abstain from meats, which God hath created,” whereas “every creature of God is good” (First to Timothy IV).

Abstinence from flesh, in the Church, is a free penance—on Friday, in Lent, on the Ember Days—never the admission that meat would be impure or its eating a fault. To raise penitential renunciation to the rank of a moral rule of purchase is to invert the order: God delivered the animals for man’s food, and no “act of purchase” is in itself a sin.

What the faithful should retain

A document of a theological commission is not a definition of the Church; it is a study, authorised to appear, not an article of faith. The faithful read it as such. What it carries of the true—God the Creator, man the steward under Him, the refusal of pantheism—he held already from the Creed and from Genesis. What it advances as new—an object of sin shifted toward the creature, a vegetarianism propped on Scripture, a purchase erected into a moral act—he measures against received doctrine and retains only what accords with it. Sobriety, the guarding of God’s gifts, the fight against avarice are ancient virtues; they need no new vocabulary to bind the conscience.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), first article of the Creed, “Creator of heaven and earth.” Sacred Scripture: Genesis I, 26-28 and IX, 1-3; First Epistle to Timothy IV, 1-5, according to the Vulgate (Douay-Rheims).