Mary Alice Jouve
The following story was published in December 2019 shortly after the end of the Amazonian Synod. It’s no surprise that Pope Francis has been slow to make the sweeping changes called for by the Catholics in the Pan-Amazon Region almost three years ago. Bishop Eugenio Coter, who works in the Amazonian Region in Bolivia, related in January 2022 that it is still difficult to ensure all Catholics in the region get communion. At the same time, he has been making progress over the course of 2021 developing an Amazonian Rite for the Church. Also, encouragingly, the Pope’s recent announcement of the creation of new cardinals includes Leonardo Ullrich, who was Archbishop of the Amazonian region in Brazil and was actively involved in the Synod.
Over the past several decades, fault lines have been forming in the Catholic Church. Leaders and members find themselves divided on how the Church’s teachings apply to myriad concerns like capitalism, colonialism, and global warming. These issues were at the heart of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, or the Amazonian Synod, called by Pope Francis this October; how Pope Francis and the Catholic Church respond to these problems and the criticisms they face will determine the future of Catholicism and its relevance to the world.
As he detailed in his new book, Without Him We Can Do Nothing, Pope Francis hoped to start the process of decoupling the Catholic Church’s presence in the Amazon from its long history of colonialism and cultural erasure. He argues that “[Christianity] is not identified with a particular culture,” so Church leaders in the Amazon should work to shape the Church and its traditions to better serve the people who live there rather than trying to erase local culture and religion.
This guiding principle has led to notable recommendations made by the Synod, as Pope Francis has emphasized synodality throughout this meeting. Synodality is the idea that both clergy and laypeople should work and dialogue together so that dioceses can better serve Catholics in the area, recognizing that each community has different needs and that assimilation is harmful.
Catholics who live in the Amazon region have expressed hope that the Synod will start the process of creating a Catholic tradition that they can take ownership of. Missionaries to the Amazon have historically associated religion with the erasure of indigenous culture. As a Tuyuka priest and a participant in the Synod, Rev. Justino Rezende recounted that Catholic missionaries often forbade parents from passing down indigenous knowledge and religious tradition. In addition, he saw many men leave the seminary because white missionaries were forcing assimilation as part of becoming a priest. This has lead to a dearth of indigenous priests in the region, making it harder for congregations to receive regular Communion.
These problems have led some Catholic religious leaders in the Amazon to start creating an indigenous Catholic tradition not unlike the other traditions that already exist in the Catholic Church such as the Eastern Rite. To solve the shortage of priests and the forcible erasure of religious traditions, members of the Synod advocated for the ordination of married priests and more indigenous priests. Creating a female diaconate has also been proposed so that more people can distribute Communion and play a pastoral role in communities. However, major doctrinal changes such as these cannot be made in a smaller gathering such as this and will require further discussion and approval by the Pope.
The general movement to reclaim indigenous traditions as part of Catholicism has led to a wider call
for the Catholic Church to make opposing climate change and capitalist exploitation a moral imperative. After listening to the perspectives of Amazonian people affected by climate
change, the Synod set forth the idea of “ecological sin” or “an action or omission against God, against others, the community and the environment.” This new concept recognizes the solidarity between animals, the environment, and humans and that ecological sin is a sin against future generations. Calling the Amazon the “biological heart” of the world, they recognize the responsibility they have for their congregations and the outsized harm that global warming and imperialism will cause to their communities.
A number of bishops also directly connect climate change to corporations, asking questions about the moral implications of supporting an economic system that is hurting the congregations the Church is supposed to be ministering to. They argue that the exploitative and “predatory” characteristics of capitalism are in opposition to Catholicism. Protecting human rights is not only a political imperative but a religious one as well, since Catholics believe humans are made in the image and likeness of God. The bishops set forth actions items such as calling on churches to divest from fossil fuels, sending ministers to be posted in individual parishes to bring the climate crisis to the forefront of parishioners’ minds, and setting up a fund for reparations to the inhabitants of the Amazon region.
Efforts to make the Catholic Church better serve the Amazon region have drawn the ire of many conservative Catholics who are further aligned with capitalist interests and wary of indigenous traditions being incorporated into the Mass. Pope Francis’s initiative to promote synodality has been criticized as creating a pathway for Catholicism to become blended with local religious traditions. Comments made by Catholic leaders against the Synod have made the controversy surrounding it even more divisive. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, a leader of conservatives in the Church, indicated in a Nov. 9 interview that if Pope Francis approved of the earlier working papers of the Synod, Burke would consider Francis in schism with the rest of the Catholic Church. Outcry was also raised over a ceremony held in the Vatican at the beginning of the Synod where the Pope blessed a statue of Pachamama, an Andean fertility goddess initially revered by the Incans. In a statement published Nov. 12 entitled “Protest against Pope Francis’s Sacrilegious Acts,” conservative Church leaders decried the ceremony as idolatry and called on him to repent. More liberal Catholic Church leaders, like Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, say that this was simply an instance of the Church adopting pagan iconography as it has done for centuries with symbols like St. Brigid’s Cross and that it was done in solidarity with the people the Church is trying to help through the Amazonian Synod. Pope Francis has continued to support the inclusion of the statue, apologizing and recovering the statue when it was thrown into the Tiber by an angry Catholic.
Catholic missionary work has long been associated with the spread of Western colonial- ist and imperialist empires. The Amazonian Synod represents an attempt by the Church to turn towards a new way of spreading Catholicism, using a framework closer to cultural diffusion rather than through an air of superiority. It also attempts to expose the complicity of many Catholics in the ravaging of the Amazon as they support the brutal, capitalistic domination of US and the governments it backs in Latin America. If the Church wants to continue to play the role of a universal moral authority, they must serve everyone and not just an elite and privileged minority.
Be First to Comment