31 October 2019, The Tablet
The Amazon Synod: Francis' efforts to revitalise the Church's mission may be gaining momentum
Marcivana
Rodrigues Paiva, representing the Sateré-Mawé indigenous people in
Brazil, in the offertory procession at the concluding Mass of the Synod
Photo: CNS, Paul Haring
Photo: CNS, Paul Haring
Francis is stepping up
his attempt to revitalise the Church’s mission, and to turn it outwards
to the world – and especially to the poor. Our Rome correspondent
wonders if the anger and fear felt by those resisting such change may be
a sign that the momentum is with the Pope
Church reform does not just happen in strategic plans and official documents. It takes place as word and action. It is word and flesh. It will be many years before we know the full impact of the Pan-Amazon Synod of Bishops. It will come to much more than the details of its final text, dramatic though some of its recommendations are, including the ordination of married deacons and the opening up of the possibility of female deacons.
Like the Second Vatican Council, which set the framework for the contemporary Church, the importance of the Amazon synod lies in the gathering itself and in the spirit of renewal it has unleashed. The event itself was the message. It may come to be seen as the defining moment of Francis’ papacy.
Like the council, the Amazon synod will be remembered as an attempt to revitalise the Church’s mission. It focused on a largely forgotten part of the world, yet one vital for the future of the planet. Like the council, it has sought to root its decision-making in the experience of the people of God, the sensus fidelium. It has been an expression of new ways of being the Church.
One of these has been a re-tuning of the Church’s communication settings from “transmit” to “receive”. The synod consulted 87,000 people in drawing up its working document; Pope Francis called for moments of silent reflection during the discussions; his own interventions were syntheses of speeches that had been given over the course of the gathering between 6 and 27 October.
The emphasis on discernment allowed voices that had often been ignored or forgotten at past synods to be heard. One of the strongest was that of women. According to Brazilian Bishop Evaristo Pascoal Spengler OFM, women lead and co-ordinate 60 per cent of Catholic communities in the Amazon. A majority of the synod bishops, according to those inside the hall, supported ordaining women to the diaconate. Pope Francis compromised, saying instead that he would re-open a 2016 commission he had set up to examine the question, and include new members. “Women put out a sign that says: ‘Please listen to us, may we be heard,’” Francis said during his final speech to the synod fathers. “And I pick up that gauntlet.”
Even more fundamentally than the issues around specific roles and ministries, the questions raised at the Amazon synod went to the heart of the Church’s future direction. Does the Church have the “daring prudence” – as Francis asked the synod fathers during the opening Mass – to find new ways to plant the seeds of the Gospel in the contemporary world? Is the Church ready to trust in the surprises of the Holy Spirit, or will it return to the styles, disciplines and customs that were used in the past?
In Francis’ eyes, the choice facing the Church is stark: to be a “museum faith”, or a to be living one. It’s a dilemma that is most pressing for Catholics in North America and Europe, where opposition to the Amazon synod has been fiercest. “The Church in the Europe of well-being and in America is tired,” the prophetic Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said shortly before his death in 2012. “Our culture has become old, our churches and our religious houses are big and empty, the bureaucratic apparatus of the Church grows, our rites and our dress are pompous.”
I witnessed three crucial moments during a dramatic October in Rome.
Each seems to point to the synod being a kairos moment of conversion, a
time when the Church is allowing itself to be reformed by the Holy
Spirit. The first was the ceremony in the Vatican gardens on 4 October
on the eve of the synod, which dedicated the gathering to St Francis of
Assisi, on the feast day of the saint of poverty, peace and the care for
Creation. The service, led by the indigenous, was an act of Christian
worship imbued by respect for indigenous culture and for creation. At
the end of the ceremony, a female indigenous leader presented a wooden
statue of a topless pregnant woman, her head bowed, to the Pope,
describing it as “Our Lady of the Amazon”. The Amazon had arrived in the
heart of the Vatican.
Some conservative North American Catholic media outlets scoffed that the Vatican had permitted a pagan “eco-ritual” and drove an angry narrative that the Church was encouraging idol worship. Among the most hostile was EWTN and its affiliate publications and the aggressively anti-Francis outlet Lifesite News. Later, two men took wooden statues of pregnant women from a display in a church near St Peter’s and threw them in the River Tiber. The video of the action was posted on YouTube. Speaking afterwards to EWTN, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, perhaps the most respected theologian among the synod fathers, explained that the wooden statue of a pregnant woman was an expression of the sacredness of life, and a pro-life symbol.
In keeping with this tradition of sanctifying cultural customs, the synod proposed the establishment of an Amazonian rite, which would incorporate indigenous rites and rituals. The fierce resistance to the synod is a sign of the fear felt by those in the Church who resist change that the momentum is with the Pope.
The second crucial event came at the beginning of the synod, when the
indigenous representatives, synod fathers and religious sisters
processed with the Pope from the tomb of St Peter to the Paul VI Hall.
They held up the statue of the indigenous woman, placards of martyrs
from Central and Latin America, and a canoe. As they processed through
St Peter’s Square and the Vatican, I was struck by the thought that this
Church “on the move” was an embodiment of an ecclesial community that
is synodal and missionary. “We are in a boat, and we are moving,” Jesuit
Cardinal Pedro Barreto, who serves in the Amazonian archdiocese of
Huancayo, told reporters at the Foreign Press Club in Rome on Monday.
“Those who criticise are on the shore, they are not in the boat.” The
boat, he explained, is the Church, which is headed for an ocean “of
love, justice and the peace of Christ”. Those on the shore, he said,
want a “static Church” where nothing changes.
The third moment took place early on Sunday morning, 20 October, at the Catacombs of Domitilla, when bishops and lay participants at the synod gathered at an ancient Christian burial site to renew the legendary “Catacombs pact” signed by 42 bishops as the Second Vatican Council was coming to an end, with the council fathers pledging to defend the poor, speak out for the voiceless and seek lay collaborators in their ministry. They pledged to return to the spirit of the early Christians, and renounce personal possessions along with “names and titles that express prominence and power”.
The new “Pact of the Catacombs for a Common Home” saw the synod
bishops pledge to defend the Amazon rainforest in the face of global
warming and the depletion of natural resources. During Mass, before the
signing of the pact, the Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes said the
synod of bishops on the Amazon was a “fruit” of the Second Vatican
Council and underlined the spiritual link between the missionary Church
in the Amazon and the first Christians.
In his closing address at the end of the synod, the Pope said the Amazon synod had offered a pastoral, spiritual, cultural and ecological diagnosis of the region. The final document takes conversion as its theme, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, a crucial figure in the drafting of the final synod text, explained that without conversion there is simply repetition and “no real change”. The document describes the Amazon as “a wounded and deformed beauty” at risk of mining and deforestation, which is increasing the threat of global warming. The future of the planet is linked to the future of the Amazon. The ecological crisis is so deep that Cardinal Czerny went so far as to say: “If we don’t change, we won’t make it.”
Francis urged the media to keep their eyes on the big picture, warning against “elites” in the Church who obsess over one small part of the synod message. “Because they don’t have the courage to be with the world, they think they are with God,” the Pope said.
He continued with his critique of religious elites during the closing Mass of the synod, when he denounced self-righteous religious behaviour for “leaving God out in the cold”. Catholics who believe themselves “righteous,” he said, end up worshipping themselves. The “cry of the poor” must become the “cry of hope of the Church”. It is the People of God, Francis stressed, and the poorest, “who are the gatekeepers of heaven”.
Speaking to the crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square after the Mass, Francis concluded that the Amazon synod had encouraged the Church to “leave comfortable shores” and go out into new waters. These, he added, are not “the swampy waters of ideologies, but in the open sea, in which the Spirit invites us to throw out the fishing nets”.
Francis has pledged to write his response to the synod’s final document by the end of the year. The Amazon has become the laboratory for his reforms, offering a lesson for the Church. It might be battling choppy waters, but the plucky synodal Church of the twenty-first century has weighed anchor and set sail.
Church reform does not just happen in strategic plans and official documents. It takes place as word and action. It is word and flesh. It will be many years before we know the full impact of the Pan-Amazon Synod of Bishops. It will come to much more than the details of its final text, dramatic though some of its recommendations are, including the ordination of married deacons and the opening up of the possibility of female deacons.
Like the Second Vatican Council, which set the framework for the contemporary Church, the importance of the Amazon synod lies in the gathering itself and in the spirit of renewal it has unleashed. The event itself was the message. It may come to be seen as the defining moment of Francis’ papacy.
Like the council, the Amazon synod will be remembered as an attempt to revitalise the Church’s mission. It focused on a largely forgotten part of the world, yet one vital for the future of the planet. Like the council, it has sought to root its decision-making in the experience of the people of God, the sensus fidelium. It has been an expression of new ways of being the Church.
One of these has been a re-tuning of the Church’s communication settings from “transmit” to “receive”. The synod consulted 87,000 people in drawing up its working document; Pope Francis called for moments of silent reflection during the discussions; his own interventions were syntheses of speeches that had been given over the course of the gathering between 6 and 27 October.
The emphasis on discernment allowed voices that had often been ignored or forgotten at past synods to be heard. One of the strongest was that of women. According to Brazilian Bishop Evaristo Pascoal Spengler OFM, women lead and co-ordinate 60 per cent of Catholic communities in the Amazon. A majority of the synod bishops, according to those inside the hall, supported ordaining women to the diaconate. Pope Francis compromised, saying instead that he would re-open a 2016 commission he had set up to examine the question, and include new members. “Women put out a sign that says: ‘Please listen to us, may we be heard,’” Francis said during his final speech to the synod fathers. “And I pick up that gauntlet.”
Even more fundamentally than the issues around specific roles and ministries, the questions raised at the Amazon synod went to the heart of the Church’s future direction. Does the Church have the “daring prudence” – as Francis asked the synod fathers during the opening Mass – to find new ways to plant the seeds of the Gospel in the contemporary world? Is the Church ready to trust in the surprises of the Holy Spirit, or will it return to the styles, disciplines and customs that were used in the past?
In Francis’ eyes, the choice facing the Church is stark: to be a “museum faith”, or a to be living one. It’s a dilemma that is most pressing for Catholics in North America and Europe, where opposition to the Amazon synod has been fiercest. “The Church in the Europe of well-being and in America is tired,” the prophetic Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said shortly before his death in 2012. “Our culture has become old, our churches and our religious houses are big and empty, the bureaucratic apparatus of the Church grows, our rites and our dress are pompous.”
Some conservative North American Catholic media outlets scoffed that the Vatican had permitted a pagan “eco-ritual” and drove an angry narrative that the Church was encouraging idol worship. Among the most hostile was EWTN and its affiliate publications and the aggressively anti-Francis outlet Lifesite News. Later, two men took wooden statues of pregnant women from a display in a church near St Peter’s and threw them in the River Tiber. The video of the action was posted on YouTube. Speaking afterwards to EWTN, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, perhaps the most respected theologian among the synod fathers, explained that the wooden statue of a pregnant woman was an expression of the sacredness of life, and a pro-life symbol.
In keeping with this tradition of sanctifying cultural customs, the synod proposed the establishment of an Amazonian rite, which would incorporate indigenous rites and rituals. The fierce resistance to the synod is a sign of the fear felt by those in the Church who resist change that the momentum is with the Pope.
The third moment took place early on Sunday morning, 20 October, at the Catacombs of Domitilla, when bishops and lay participants at the synod gathered at an ancient Christian burial site to renew the legendary “Catacombs pact” signed by 42 bishops as the Second Vatican Council was coming to an end, with the council fathers pledging to defend the poor, speak out for the voiceless and seek lay collaborators in their ministry. They pledged to return to the spirit of the early Christians, and renounce personal possessions along with “names and titles that express prominence and power”.
In his closing address at the end of the synod, the Pope said the Amazon synod had offered a pastoral, spiritual, cultural and ecological diagnosis of the region. The final document takes conversion as its theme, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, a crucial figure in the drafting of the final synod text, explained that without conversion there is simply repetition and “no real change”. The document describes the Amazon as “a wounded and deformed beauty” at risk of mining and deforestation, which is increasing the threat of global warming. The future of the planet is linked to the future of the Amazon. The ecological crisis is so deep that Cardinal Czerny went so far as to say: “If we don’t change, we won’t make it.”
Francis urged the media to keep their eyes on the big picture, warning against “elites” in the Church who obsess over one small part of the synod message. “Because they don’t have the courage to be with the world, they think they are with God,” the Pope said.
He continued with his critique of religious elites during the closing Mass of the synod, when he denounced self-righteous religious behaviour for “leaving God out in the cold”. Catholics who believe themselves “righteous,” he said, end up worshipping themselves. The “cry of the poor” must become the “cry of hope of the Church”. It is the People of God, Francis stressed, and the poorest, “who are the gatekeepers of heaven”.
Speaking to the crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square after the Mass, Francis concluded that the Amazon synod had encouraged the Church to “leave comfortable shores” and go out into new waters. These, he added, are not “the swampy waters of ideologies, but in the open sea, in which the Spirit invites us to throw out the fishing nets”.
Francis has pledged to write his response to the synod’s final document by the end of the year. The Amazon has become the laboratory for his reforms, offering a lesson for the Church. It might be battling choppy waters, but the plucky synodal Church of the twenty-first century has weighed anchor and set sail.
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