Pope hosts conservation meet
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis yesterday opened a divisive meeting on preserving the Amazon and ministering to its indigenous peoples as he fended off attacks from conservatives who are opposed to his ecological agenda.
Pope Francis celebrated an opening Mass in St Peter’s Basilica with global attention newly focused on the forest fires that are devouring the Amazon rainforest, which scientists say is a crucial bulwark against global warming.
On hand for the service were indigenous peoples, some with their faces painted and wearing feathered headdresses, as well as more than 180 cardinals, bishops and priests, who donned green vestments like the pope. They travelled to Rome from the region for three weeks of debate at a special synod, or meeting, which has become one of the most controversial of Pope Francis’ papacy.
Among the most contentious proposals on the agenda is whether married elders could be ordained priests to address the chronic priest shortages in the region. Currently, indigenous Catholics in remote parts of the Amazon can go months without seeing a priest or having a proper Mass.
Another proposal calls for the Catholic church to identify new “official ministries’’ for women, though organisers have made it clear that priestly ordination is off the table.
Pope Francis’ conservative critics, including a handful of cardinals, have called the proposals “heretical’’ and an invitation to a “pagan’’ religion that idolises nature rather than God. They have mounted an opposition campaign, issuing petitions and holding conferences to raise their voices.
In many ways, Pope Francis opened the synod last year, when he travelled into the Peruvian Amazon and demanded that corporations stop their relentless extraction of timber, gas and gold.
Meeting with native families in steamy Puerto Maldonado, Pope Francis declared that the Amazon and its indigenous peoples are the “heart of the church’’ and demanded that governments recognize their rights to determine the region’s future.
The seeds of the Amazon synod, however, long predate that visit and even Francis’ landmark 2015 encyclical “Praise Be’,’ in which he denounced the profit-at-all-cost business interests destroying the rainforest.
The pope, when he was the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina, drafted the final document of the 2007 meeting of South American bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, which identified the Amazon and its indigenous peoples as threatened by global economic interests and deserving of the church’s utmost attention. Pope Francis’ closest advisers have said the Aparecida document was in many ways a blueprint for the papacy.
Scientists say the vast rainforest’s lush vegetation absorbs heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The moisture given off by its trees also affects rainfall patterns and climate across South America and beyond.