The Amazonian Church
of Pope Francis
Roberto de Mattei
Aldo Maria Valli
blogspot
June 20, 2019
"Will the bishops, successors of the Apostles be silent? Will the cardinals, the Pope’s advisors in the governing of the Church be silent, in the face of this political-religious manifesto which perverts the doctrine and praxis of the Mystical Body of Christ ? "
The first reactions in
response to the Instrumentum Laboris for the Amazon
Synod were focused on its opening to married priests and the insertion of women
into the sacramental orders of the Church. But the Instrumentum Laboris is something more: it’s a manifesto for
liberation eco-theology which proposes a pantheist, egalitarian “cosmo-vision” ,
unacceptable for a Catholic. The gates of the Magisterim, as José Antonio Ureta, rightly
highlighted, are being thrown wide open “to Indian Theology and Ecotheology,
two Latin American derivatives of Liberation Theology. After the collapse of
the USSR and the failure of “real socialism”, the advocates of Liberation Theology
(LT), on the Marxist style, attributed the historic role of revolutionary force
to indigenous peoples and to nature”.*
In the document,
published by the Holy See on June 17, the Amazon “bursts” into the life of the Church like a “new entity” (n.2). But what is the Amazon? It is not only a
physical place and a “complex biosphere”
(n.10) but also “a reality full of life
and wisdom” (n.5), which ascends to a conceptual paradigm and calls us to a
“pastoral, ecological and synodal”
conversion (n.5). In order to carry out
its prophetic role, the Church must heed “the
Amazon peoples” (n.7). These people are able to live in “intercommunication” with the entire
cosmos (n.12), but their rights are threatened by the economic interests of the
multinationals, which, as the natives of Guaviare (Colombia) say “have slashed the veins of our Mother Earth”
(n.17).
The Church listens to the “cry, of
both the people and the earth (n.18), because in the Amazon “the land is a theological place by which the
faith is lived. It is also a unique source of God’s revelation” (n.19). So
then, a third source of Revelation has been added to Holy Scripture and
Tradition: the Amazon, the land where “everything
is connected” (n.20), everything is “constitutively
related, forming a vital whole” (n.21). In the Amazon, the ideal of
Communism is fulfilled, given that, in tribal collectivism, “everything is shared and private spaces –
typical of modernity – are minimal.”
The
native peoples have been liberated from monotheism and have restored animism
and polytheism. Indeed, as is written in
no. 25: “the life of the Amazonian
community has not yet been influenced by Western civilization. This is
reflected in the beliefs and rites regarding the action of spirits and the divinity
– named in many different ways – with
and in the territory, with and in relation to nature. This cosmo-vision is
picked up in Francis’s ‘mantra’: “everything is connected” (LS 16, 91, 117, 138, 240)».
The
document insists on asserting that the Amazonian “cosmo-vision” encompasses an
“ancestral wisdom, a living reservoir of
spirituality and native culture (n. 26). So, “the native people of the Amazon have much to teach us(…). The new paths
of evangelization must be constructed in dialogue with these ancestral wisdoms
in which the seeds of the Word are manifested” (n.29).
The
wealth of the Amazon [then] is in not being monoculture, but of being “a multiethnic, multicultural and
multi-religious world” (n.36) with which we need to dialogue. The peoples of the Amazon, “remind us of the past and the wounds
inflicted during long periods of colonization. For this Pope Francis has asked
‘humbly for forgiveness, not only for the offences of his own Church,
but for the crimes against the native populations during the so-called conquest
of America’. In the past the Church has at times been an accomplice of the
colonizers and this has suffocated the prophetic voice of the Gospel”
(n.38).
“Integral
ecology” includes “the transmission
of the ancestral experience of cosmologies, of spiritualities and theologies of
the indigenous peoples, in the care of our Common Home” (n.50). “In their ancestral wisdom – these
peoples- have cultivated the conviction
that all creation is connected, that it deserves our respect and our
responsibility. The Amazonian culture, which integrates human beings with
nature, becomes a point of reference for the construction of a new paradigm of
integral ecology” (n.56).
The
Church must divest itself of its Roman identity and adopt “an Amazonian face”. “The
Amazonian face of the Church finds its expression in the plurality of its
peoples, cultures and ecosystems. This diversity requires an option for an
outward-bound and missionary Church, incarnated in all its activities,
expressions and languages” (n.107). “A
Church with an Amazonian face in its multiple nuances, seeks to be an
“outward-bound” Church (cf. EG 20-23),
which leaves behind a colonial mono-cultural, clerical and domineering tradition
and knows how to discern and adopt without fear, the diverse cultural
expressions of the peoples” (n.110).
The pantheist spirit animating Amazonian nature is a
leitmotif of the document. “The Creator Spirit which fills the universe
(cf. Wisdom 1,7) is the Spirit that for centuries has nurtured the spirituality
of these peoples even before the proclaiming of the Gospel and spurs them onto
accepting it, from the base of their [own] cultures and traditions”(n.120).
Hence, “we need to grasp what the Spirit
of the Lord has taught these peoples over the course of the centuries: faith in
God, Father-Mother-Creator; the sense of communion and harmony with the earth;
the sense of solidarity with their fellow-man; the project of “living well”;
the wisdom of a thousand-year old civilization the elders possess and which has
effects on the health, cohabitation, education and cultivation of the land; the
relationship with nature and Mother Earth; the capacity of resistance and
resilience of the women in particular; the religious rites expressed; the
relations with their forbearers; their contemplative stance and sense of
gratuity; the celebration and festivity
and the sacred sense of the land” (121).
Again, in the light of a “healthy decentralization” of the Church, “the communities ask that the Episcopal Conferences adapt the
Eucharistic Rite to their culture”. “The
Church needs to be incarnated in the Amazonian cultures which possess a great
sense of community, equality and solidarity, thus clericalism is not accepted
in its various forms of manifestation.
The indigenous peoples possess a rich tradition of social organization, where authority is in
rotation and has a profound sense of service.
On the basis of this experience in organization, it would be opportune
to reconsider the idea that the exercise in jurisdiction (power of government)
must be connected in all spheres (sacramental, judiciary, administrative) and
in a permanent way to the Sacrament of Holy Orders” (n.127).
On the basis of the premise
that “celibacy is a gift for the Church”
a request is being made that “for the
most remote zones in the region, a study be made about the possibility of
priestly ordination for elderly people, preferably natives, respected and
accepted in their communities - even if they may have already a constituted and
stable family - as a means of guaranteeing the Sacraments which accompany and
sustain Christian life” (n.129). Furthermore, we need “to guarantee leadership to the women, along with more extensive and
relevant spaces in the field of formation: theology, catechesis, liturgy and
schools of faith and politics” and “identify the type of official ministry
that can be conferred on women, keeping in mind the central role they
play today in the Amazonian Church.”
What more can be added? Will the bishops, successors of the Apostles
be silent? Will the cardinals, the Pope’s advisors in the governing of the
Church be silent, in the face of this political-religious manifesto which
perverts the doctrine and praxis of the Mystical Body of Christ ?
Translation:
Contributor Francesca Romana
