Pope: Amazon Indigenous ‘heart of the church’
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru — From deep in the scorching Amazon rainforest, Pope Francis demanded Friday that corporations stop their relentless extraction of timber, gas and gold from God’s “holy ground,” and called on governments to recognize the Indigenous peoples living there as the primary forces in determining its future.
Bare-chested and tattooed native families, many sporting feathered and beaded headgear, interrupted Francis repeatedly with applause, wailing horns and beating drums as history’s first Latin American pope declared the Amazon and its Indigenous peoples the “heart of the church.”
In the highlight of his weeklong trip to Chile and Peru, Francis warned that the Amazon people are now more threatened than ever before, and called for a three-fold defence of their life, their land and their cultures.
“You are a living memory of the mission that God has entrusted to us all: the protection of our common home,” the pope said.
Francis travelled to the city of Puerto Maldonado, the gateway to Peru’s Amazon, before even calling on President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a protocol-bending change to the itinerary undertaken because of weather concerns that had the unintended effect of signalling that the Amazon natives were Francis’ top priority in Peru.
Francis did meet later with Kuczynski in the presidential palace in Lima, where he blasted corruption as a “social virus” that must be stopped — a charged comment given the Peruvian president is under investigation in Latin America’s biggest corruption scandal.
Francis’s trip to the Amazon came as the expansion of illegal gold mining, new roads, dams and farming have all turned thousands of acres of once lush green forest into barren, contaminated wastelands.
In his landmark 2015 encyclical, “Praise Be,” Francis demanded world leaders do more to protect what he called “one of the lungs” of God’s creation, and denounced the profit-at-all-cost business interests behind its steady demise.
The issue is so important to the Pope that he has called a global church meeting next year on the Amazon and its native peoples. Friday’s encounter served in many ways as an unofficial opening to the synod.
SANTIAGO, Chile — Pope Francis accused victims of Chile’s most notorious pedophile of slander in an astonishing end to a visit meant to help heal the wounds of a sex-abuse scandal that has cost the Catholic Church its credibility in the country.
Francis said that until he sees proof that Bishop Juan Barros was complicit in covering up the sex crimes of the Rev. Fernando Karadima, such accusations against Barros are “all calumny.”
The pope’s remarks drew shock from Chileans and immediate rebuke from victims and their advocates. They noted the accusers were deemed credible enough by the Vatican that it sentenced Karadima to a lifetime of “penance and prayer” for his crimes in 2011. A Chilean judge also found the victims to be credible, saying that while she had to drop criminal charges against Karadima because too much time had passed, proof of his crimes wasn’t lacking.
“As if I could have taken a selfie or a photo while Karadima abused me and others and Juan Barros stood by watching it all,” Barros’s most vocal accuser, Juan Carlos Cruz, wrote on Twitter. “These people are truly crazy, and the pontiff talks about atonement to the victims. Nothing has changed and his plea for forgiveness is empty.”
The Karadima scandal dominated Francis’s visit to Chile and the overall issue of sex abuse and church coverup rumbled on as he left Chile for a three-day visit to Peru.
Karadima’s victims reported to church authorities as early as 2002 that he would kiss and fondle them in the Santiago parish he ran, but officials refused to believe them. Only when the victims went public with their accusations in 2010 did the Vatican launch an investigation that led to Karadima being removed from ministry.
The emeritus archbishop of Santiago subsequently apologized for having refused to believe the victims from the start.
Francis reopened the wounds of the scandal in 2015 when he named Barros, a protege of Karadima, as bishop of the southern diocese of Osorno. Karadima’s victims say Barros knew of the abuse, having seen it, but did nothing. Barros has denied the allegations.
His appointment outraged Chileans, badly divided the Osorno diocese and further undermined the church’s shaky credibility in the country.
Francis had sought to heal the wounds by meeting this week with abuse victims and begging forgiveness for the crimes of church pastors. But on Thursday, he struck a defiant tone when asked by a Chilean journalist about Barros. “The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I’ll speak,” Francis said. “There is not one shred of proof against him. It’s all calumny. Is that clear?”
Francis had defended the appointment before, calling the Osorno controversy “stupid” and the result of a campaign mounted by leftists. But the Associated Press reported last week that the Vatican was so worried about the fallout from the Karadima affair that it was prepared in 2014 to ask Barros and two other Karadima-trained bishops to resign and go on a yearlong sabbatical.
According to a Jan. 31, 2015, letter obtained by AP from Francis to the executive committee of the Chilean bishops’ conference, the plan fell apart and Barros was sent to Osorno.
Juan Carlos Claret, spokesman for a group of Osorno lay Catholics who have mounted a threeyear campaign against Barros, questioned why Francis was now accusing the victims of slandering Barros when the Vatican was so convinced of their claims that it planned to remove him in 2014.
“Isn’t the pastoral problem that we’re living [in Osorno] enough to get rid of him?” Claret asked.
The reference was to the fact that — guilty or not — Barros has been unable to do his job because so many Osorno Catholics and priests don’t recognize him as their bishop. They staged a protest during his 2015 installation ceremony and have protested his presence ever since.