CathNews New Zealand

As the Sun sets over Nazareth, a village on the banks of the Amazon river in the Colombian rainforest, a Jesuit priest peers out at a small congregation, made up of members of the indigenous Tikuna people.

They are sitting on rickety benches around the edges of a cement church.

“Why is everyone so far away?” asks Father Valério Paulo Sartor, stepping down from the altar to say mass from the aisle.

“If you won’t come to me, I’ll come to you.”

Some 6,000 miles away in Rome, bishops, indigenous leaders and NGO representatives from the Amazon basin, together with Vatican prelates, are discussing how the Catholic church can do just that.

In a three-week synod that ends on October 27th, they hope to find new ways for the church to work with local communities to tackle the crises facing the region—and Catholicism—in a part of the world where the church is overstretched, understaffed, yet still remarkably influential.

The synod represents the biggest step yet towards recognising something many Catholics in the West, especially church leaders, have been reluctant to acknowledge: just as economic and diplomatic power in the secular world is slipping away from the North Atlantic region, a similar process is taking place in Catholicism.

In the secular world, the shift is to Asia.

Within the Catholic church it is towards not only Asia, but Africa and Latin America, too.

That is forcing the church to consider how far it is willing to adapt to the practices and beliefs of cultures with their own spiritual traditions.

The synod has added to fears of a new schism within the church.

Catholicism’s three biggest national churches are those of Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines.

It has become a religion largely of the poor world, but with a leadership that is still predominantly rooted in the rich one. Around 40% of baptised Catholics are from North America, Europe, Australasia and Japan, yet those regions provide the church with 57% of its cardinals. Italy, with 4% of the world’s Catholic population, is the birthplace of almost one in five of the “princes of the church”.

Pope Francis, who is the first Latin American pontiff, has tried to rebalance things.

He joked on the night of his election in 2013 that his fellow cardinals had gone “almost to the ends of the Earth” to find him.

He has continued their quest.

More than half the cardinals he has created come from the developing world.

His long-awaited reform of the administration of the Catholic church may take the process further by reducing the scope of the Vatican and transferring some of its departments—and power—to other parts of the world.

That shift has been exacerbated by the growing threat posed by climate change.

The pope has long argued that care for the environment is inseparable from the fight against global inequality.

He called the synod, the first to be dedicated to a single region, partly because of the Amazon’s crucial role as a buffer against climate change.

Its basin contains 40% of Earth’s rainforests and serves as a carbon sink, mitigating warming.

But rising deforestation, on the pretext of development, threatens the sustainability of the ecosystem.

The insouciance of regional governments, especially Brazil’s, puts them on a collision course with the church.

Leaders from half a dozen ethnic groups gathered recently in Atalaia do Norte, a town outside an indigenous territory the size of Austria, to discuss a rise in invasions by illegal miners and loggers emboldened by Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.

His government has shrugged off deforestation, vowed to legalise mining on indigenous lands, and hollowed out the environment ministry and the indigenous agency, FUNAI.

The murder in September of a contractor from FUNAI who worked in that territory, Vale do Javari—and the subsequent exodus of other workers after they were threatened—left the tribes feeling even more vulnerable.

Despite the church’s chequered history in the region (it is credited with educating millions of poor children but blamed for its complicity with colonialism and the economic exploitation that followed), many indigenous people see the institution as their most promising ally.

“In the past, the church made us lose our culture, but there’s a new spirit in the head of the pope,” says Absalon, a middle-aged curaca (chief) from a Uitoto village near Nazareth.

The Indigenist Missionary Council (CIMI), a human-rights organisation established by the Catholic church in Brazil in 1972 and run mostly by lay-workers, helps indigenous tribes secure land rights and put pressure on governments to uphold them.

In a vast region where the state’s presence is limited, CIMI also tells the authorities about abuses against indigenous people.

“The church is often the bridge between the tribes and the government,” says Felício Pontes, a public prosecutor who worked for two decades in the Amazon.

“It saves us time and money.”

But the Catholic church is not an NGO; it wants to save souls as well as trees. Continue reading

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