Erwin Kräutler, the bishop emeritus of Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon, expressed concern that not a word was said about opening up the Sacrament of Holy Orders to married men and ordaining women to the diaconate.

Many bishops "were and still are" looking for a plausible explanation as to why the two issues were not mentioned.

Some of them thought that the Pope had wanted to avoid a "schism". He had "certainly been under great pressure from the Curia" at the time, Kräutler pointed out.

"That was already crystal clear at the synod sessions and during our talks with the Curia. We found very little understanding for the problems and issues of the Amazon Region which we here experience day by day."

According to notes from the pope included in an article published in the Catholic periodical La Civiltà Cattolica, Pope Francis did not approve a proposal to ordain married men in the Amazon region because the idea was not prayerfully discerned at a 2019 synod of bishops.

"There was a discussion, a rich discussion, and a well-founded discussion, but no discernment. This is something different than just arriving at a good and justified consensus or at a relative majority," Pope Francis said, on the issue of addressing a priest shortage in the Amazon by ordaining so-called viri probati, or older, mature and married men from local communities.

However, just because Pope Francis did not mention the issues of ordaining married men to the priesthood and ordaining women deacons in his post-synodal exhortation, this "certainly does not mean that these issues are off the table," Kräutler underlined.

He recalled that right at the beginning of Querida Amazonia Pope Francis had made it clear that he would not be going into all the issues the Synod had gone into and had asked people to read the final Synod document very carefully.

And the final document, Kräutler pointed out, had underlined how important the permanent diaconate for women was in the Amazon Region.

He personally was convinced that the starting point of every discussion on the priestly ministry could not be the tradition of the Early Church but rather the needs of today.

Sources

The Tablet

Catholic News Agency

It is a post-synodal apostolic exhortation, that is, the Holy Father's summing up of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazonian Region, which took place in October of last year.

The synod gathered Catholic bishops, clergy, theologians and lay people, including indigenous leaders from the region, to reflect on cultural, ecological and religious issues facing the Amazon.

Even though synods have been around for centuries and were given renewed emphasis by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Amazon synod was the first meeting of its kind to be organized around a distinct ecological territory.

The region contains about 34 million inhabitants, including three million indigenous people from nearly 400 ethnic groups.

Pope Francis sees synods as opportunities for what Jesuits call "group discernment," during which the Holy Spirit works through discussions and deliberations.

This is one way that the pope tries to engage as many people as possible in important decisions.

Thus, in "Querida Amazonia, "the pope is reflecting on what happened in that large group discernment.

So, let's look at five takeaways from "Querida Amazonia."

To do that, I will follow the pope's four-part structure in the document and then add one final observation.

First

Francis dreams of a region that fights for the "rights of the poor," especially those of the "original peoples" of the area.

The pope takes aim at businesses, both national and international, that harm the Amazon and fail to respect the rights of the original peoples and bluntly labels such actions as "injustice and crime."

We should feel "outrage," he says, when we see a minority of people profiting from the "poverty of the majority and from the unscrupulous plundering of the region's natural riches."

The pope also apologizes for times when the church itself participated in these injustices and crimes.

Second

Pope Francis hopes for a world and a church that will recognize the distinctive cultural riches of the Amazon.

In many places in the region, the globalized economy endangers or threatens "human, social and cultural richness."

So these distinctive cultures must be nourished, protected and celebrated.

"Each distinct group in a vital synthesis with its surroundings," he says, "develops its own form of wisdom."

But to hear this wisdom we need to protect and reverence the cultures from which it came.

Third

"Querida Amazonia "reiterates some of the most important themes from the pope's magisterial encyclical on creation, "Laudato Si'." Grounding his appreciation for the environment in a reverence for God's creation, he reminds us that everything is connected: "The care of people and the care of ecosystems," he says, "are inseparable."

But many economic interests see the Amazon simply as a place of industry or a place where one can withdraw natural resources, even though the equilibrium of the planet "depends on the health of the Amazon region."

We should, says the pope about the Amazon, "love it, not simply use it."

Fourth

The pope turns his reflections to the church in the Amazon, and repeatedly stresses "inculturation."

This is an important theological concept, especially since Vatican II, but really since the beginning of the proclamation of the Gospel, because the Gospel message must always be announced in new ways to new cultures. Continue reading

But those new paths do not include the ordination of married men to the priesthood in the region.

The document, called "Querida Amazonia" (Beloved Amazon), is born from the discussions of over 180 bishops from all over the world who gathered at the Vatican last fall (Oct. 6-27) to address the social, environmental and spiritual needs of the indigenous people of the Amazon and their habitat.

During their meeting, bishops had suggested in their final document that the pope consider the ordination of tested married men to minister to the remote areas of the Amazon forest sprawled over nine Latin American countries.

Bishops had also voted to further discussions on female deacons, which would allow women to preach, distribute the Eucharist and officiate at weddings, baptisms and funerals.

Pope Francis' document doesn't make any mention of the ordination of married men nor of women, which is consistent with the efforts made by the Vatican to downplay expectations ahead of its publication.

In January, former Pope Benedict XVI published a book with Cardinal Robert Sarah, who heads the Vatican department for liturgy, making a case for the importance of celibacy in the priesthood.

"Querida Amazonia" is divided into four chapters, each corresponding to a "dream" of the pope on the social, cultural, ecological and ecclesial aspects of the Amazon. It includes numerous poems by indigenous people detailing the beauty — and destruction — of the Amazon.

The papal document encourages Catholics and all people of goodwill to protect the environment, accompany the diaspora of indigenous peoples and stand up against injustice and reckless exploitation.

During colonization, the people of the Amazon forest "were considered more an obstacle needing to be eliminated than as human beings with the same dignity as others and possessed of their own acquired rights," Francis wrote.

"The businesses, national or international, which harm the Amazon and fail to respect the right of the original peoples," he wrote, "should be called for what they are: injustice and crime."

"Colonization has left tremendous wounds in the Amazon, the pope said, but colonization continues today even though it is "changed, disguised."

"The interest of a few powerful industries should not be considered more important than the good of the Amazon region or humanity as a whole," he warned.

Francis admitted that while missionaries were among the few who stood up to defend the rights of the Amazon and its peoples, the Catholic Church also bears its responsibility and its members were "part of a network of corruption."

"I express my shame and once more I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offences of the Church herself, but for the crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America as well as for the terrible crimes that followed throughout the history of the Amazon region," he said.

In a section addressing forms of ministry, the pope called for "a specific and courageous response" to the shortage of priests in the Amazon.

Though ordaining married men is out of the question, at least in this document, the pope encouraged bishops to take matters into their own hands.

"This urgent need leads me to urge all bishops, especially those in Latin America, not only to promote prayer for priestly vocations, but also to be more generous in encouraging those who display a missionary vocation to opt for the Amazon region," he wrote, putting an emphasis on the need to overhaul priestly formation.

A large role is played and continues to be played by "mature and lay leaders," who must be promoted and encouraged by the Catholic clergy, Francis wrote. Women especially, he said, "have kept the Church alive in those places through their remarkable devotion and deep faith."

But ordaining women as deacons, he said, could be harmful.

"It would lead us to clericalize women, diminish the great value of what they have already accomplished, and subtly make their indispensable contribution less effective," he said.

Instead, he said that women should have positions of authority within the church "that do not entail Holy Orders and that can better signify the role that is theirs."

As a starting point, Francis referred to Mary as a source of inspiration for furthering the role of women.

"Perhaps it is time to review the lay ministries already existing in the Church, return to their foundations and update them by reading them in the light of current reality and the inspiration of the Spirit, and at the same time to create other new stable ministries with public recognition and a commission from the bishop," Cardinal Michael Czerny said in an interview published by the Vatican alongside the papal document. Czerny was a special secretary to the synod of bishops on the Amazon.

Francis called for a fruitful dialogue between the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and the Catholic Church in order to give the church "new faces with Amazonian features."

The culture, traditions and history of the tribes living in the Amazon must be protected and respected, without "unfair generalizations, simplistic arguments and conclusions drawn only from the basis of our own mindset and experiences," he said.

Indigenous people should not be insulated from a respectful dialogue, Francis wrote, just as the Catholic Church should allow the gospel to be permeated by the customs and culture of the peoples living in the Amazon.

"The Pope asks that the voice of the elderly be heard and that the values present in the original communities be recognized," Czerny said. "Indigenous peoples teach us to be sober, content with little, and to sense the need to be immersed in a communal way of living our lives."

The bishops had asked the pope to consider the possibility of an Amazonian Rite, which in the Catholic tradition would have its own bishops and specific liturgies while still being in communion with the Catholic Church.

Francis encouraged "native forms of expression in song, rituals, gestures and symbols" but made no mention of a specific rite or a commission created to consider it.

Francis also seemed to passingly address the Pachamama debacle, when vandals broke into a church in Rome at the height of the synod, dumped a wooden carving of an Amazonian fertility goddess into the Tiber River and posted it on YouTube.

The vandals justified their actions at the time, stating that they were angered by a ceremony in the Vatican gardens where indigenous people knelt before the statues before the pontiff.

"It is possible to take up an indigenous symbol in some way, without necessarily considering it as idolatry," the pope wrote. "A myth charged with spiritual meaning can be used to advantage and not always considered a pagan error."

The pope's final words amid highly divisive times within and beyond the Catholic Church are to promote dialogue "at a higher level, where each group can join the other in a new reality, while remaining faithful to itself."

• Claire Giangrave is Vatican Correspondent for Religion News Service.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.
• Image YouTube

A request to do this came from bishops at the recent Synod for the Amazon.

In its final document, the synod defined ecological sin as a sin against God and future generations. It "manifests itself in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the harmony of the environment."

Protecting the environment is one of Francis's particular priorities. His encyclical Laudato Si' (2015) is about this.

"We have to introduce, we are thinking about it, in the catechism of the Catholic Church, the sin against ecology, the sin against our common home, because it's a duty," he says.

According to the Rome Statute the International Criminal Court adopted in 1998, there are four core international crimes.

They are: crimes against humanity, genocide, war crimes and crimes of aggression.

Francis wants the international community to recognise ecocide as a "fifth category of crime against peace."

This includes "the massive contamination of air, land and water resources, the large-scale destruction of flora and fauna, and any action capable of producing an ecological disaster or destroying an ecosystem."

Speaking to last week's 20th world congress of the International Association of Penal Law, held in Rome, Francis said the culture of waste is only part of the problem.

Combined with other widespread phenomena in western societies, it is showing the "serious tendency to degenerate into a culture of hatred."

"It is no coincidence that in these times, emblems and actions typical of Nazism reappear, which, with its persecutions against Jews, gypsies and people of homosexual orientation, represents the negative model par excellence of a culture of waste and hatred," Francis told conference participants.

"On this occasion, and through you, I would like to appeal to all the leaders and representatives in this sector to help with efforts ... to ensure the adequate legal protection of our common home."

He also criticized the "market idolatry" that makes individual people defenseless before the interests of the "divinized market".

This market has become the absolute ruler, with some economic sectors exercising more power than the state itself, he said.

"The principle of profit maximization, isolated from any other consideration, leads to a model of exclusion which violently attacks those who now suffer its social and economic costs, while future generations are condemned to pay the environmental costs."

Source

• America Magazine
• The Wall Street Journal
• Crux Now
• Image: treehugger.com

A general summary of the topics discussed during the closed-door session has been published.

Some of the discussions focused on ordaining married men. It was described as a "legitimate need" but one which "cannot affect a substantial rethinking of the nature of the priesthood and its relationship with celibacy" in the Latin rite.

Instead, vocational programmes for young indigenous men to promote evangelization in remote areas could be considered.

This way there would not be "first-class Catholics" who have easy access to the Eucharist and "second-class Catholics" who go without the sacrament, sometimes even for two years at a time.

Another topic focused on the need to avoid the "colonialism" that characterised early missionary efforts. Rather, cultural identities in the Amazon should be preserved.

This is important, as every culture makes its contribution to the "catholicity" of the church, which is built on respect and complementarity.

Some bishops said the church is like a complex ecosystem with "wonderful spiritual biodiversity" expressed in so many different communities, cultures, forms of religious life and ministries.

Others focused on indigenous practices.

When they are not tied to superstitious beliefs, these practices are looked upon with "benevolence" so long as they may become in tune with "the true liturgical spirit," the speakers said.

Collecting and sharing the different "inculturated celebrations" indigenous communities use with the sacraments of baptism, marriage and priestly ordination is an option one speaker proffered.

Others built on this idea. One bishop suggested there might be a way to establish on an experimental basis — and after appropriate theological, liturgical and pastoral study — an Amazonian Catholic rite for living and celebrating faith in Christ.

Protecting groundwater from chemical contaminants coming from multinational companies and the effect mining in the region is having on the environment were also topics of concern.

Other speakers focused on the serious consequences abusive practices are having on local peoples and urged respect for human and environmental rights.

Climate change, ending the use of fossil fuels, especially in industrialized nations which produce the most pollutants, are similar concerns.

The way many young people are taking the lead in promoting "integral ecology" was noted.

It is important to reach out to young people on issues dealing with safeguarding creation and to promote young people's efforts, many bishops agreed.

Source

• Catholic News Service
• Image: Catholic News Agency

It is is not official church teaching, he says.

It is a way for bishops to listen to the local church's concerns.

The working document ( also called the Instrumentum Laboris) "isn't a document of the synod, it is for the synod," Hummes told journalists.

"It is the voice of the local church, the voice of the church in the Amazon: of the church, of the people, of the history and of the very earth, the voice of the earth," he said.

Hummes and Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops, responded to a journalist's questions about criticisms against the synod and its working document.

The Vatican-based synod, which began on Sunday and will continue for most of this month, will focus on "Amazonia: New paths for the church and for an integral ecology."

In June, German Cardinal Walter Brandmuller published an essay in which he accused the synod's working document of being heretical.

This is because it refers to the rainforest as a place of divine revelation, he wrote.

He also criticized the synod for its plans to get involved in social and environmental affairs.

Other critics, U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke and Auxiliary Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, voiced similar accusations in a released on 12 September.

In this, they cited "serious theological errors and heresies" in the synod's working document.

In response, Baldisseri said, "if there is a cardinal or a bishop who does not agree, who sees that there is content that does not correspond (to church teaching), well then, in the meantime I would say that it is necessary to listen and not judge because it isn't a magisterial document."

Baldisseri explained while he believes everyone should be free to express their disagreement, he also thinks it is inappropriate "that a judgment should be made about a document that isn't a pontifical document.

"This is just a working document that will be given to the synod fathers," he said.

"And that will be the basis to begin the work and build the final document from zero. It's also known as a ‘martyred document.'"

Hummes said the synod's working document arose from the church's desire to listen to the local church in the Amazon.

"The church didn't do it for the sake of doing it to only ignore them," he daid.

"No! If it was done, it was so that (the church) could to listen to them. This is the synodal path: to seriously listen."

Source

• Catholic News Service
• Image: America Magazine

The context of the discussion will focus on the Church in the Amazon basin.

His comments came in response to a question on the matter from Cardinal Claudio Hummes.

Hummes is the president of the Episcopal Commission for the Amazon, according to the newspaper Il Messaggero.

The newspaper says Hummes asked Francis to consider ordaining viri probati, married men of great faith.

These men would be considered capable of ministering spiritually to the many remote communities in the Amazon.

There is a shortage of priests in the Amazon, and evangelical Christians and pagan sects are displacing Catholicism.

This does not mean Francis is considering opening the door for all Catholic priests to marry.

Dr. Kurt Martens, a canon lawyer and professor at The Catholic University of America, says the Pope's comments don't mean the door will open to the married priesthood throughout the Church.

He says the pope's response was specifically about whether "viri probati" or "proven men" of virtue and prudence could be ordained to the priesthood.

Some people think ordaining these men may resolve the shortage of priestly vocations in Brazil.

"Even if the synod would recommend or ask for the ordination of viri probati in the Pan-Amazon area, it is important to note that the Pope still would have to accept the request and make it into law, and it would most likely be limited to that area," Martens says.

"So we are not talking about changing the law on celibacy for the whole Church: it would be the ordination of viri probati for only that region."

In the Amazon region the ratio of Catholics to priests is 10,000 to one.

This is about three times the worldwide ratio of Catholics to priests throughout the world.

Monsignor Erwin Krautler, the secretary of the Episcopal Commission supports Hummes's request.

He has also suggested the bishops attending next year's synod on the Amazon should consider ordaining women deacons as priests.

Source

• Catholic News Agency
• The Telegraph
• Bella Naija
• Image: petercanisiusmichaeldavidkang