Amazon Synod Poised to Wage Total War on Catholic Faith

July 5, 2019


The Synod on the Amazon will lead to a “rupture” in the Catholic Church: “nothing will be as it was before.” These words were spoken on May 2, 2019, by German Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, in charge of the organization Adveniat which provides Catholic relief for Latin America.

Heterodox “Liberation Theology” Forms Basis of Working Document

The “new paradigm of integral ecology” proposed by the Instrumentum Laboris (n. 56) finds its metaphysical foundation in the indigenous theology of Latin America, a “post-modern” development of so-called “liberation theology” which was condemned by Pope John Paul II in 1985. The Vatican document actually has its theologian of reference in the ex-Franciscan Leonardo Boff, the theologian who has been most coherent in developing liberation theology into indigenous “eco-theology.” Boff, who was born in 1938, became a Franciscan in 1959 after he had joined the most radical wing of liberation theology. He then abandoned his Fransican habit and the priesthood in order to go and live with the Marxist activist Marcia Maria Monteiro de Miranda. In late 2016, he boasted in a German-language interview of having helped Pope Francis write Laudato Sì.

The Instrumentum Laboris again takes up, in many passages, Boff’s slogan that is also the title of one of his books, The Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor (Cittadella, Rome 1996). The document affirms that the Church listens to the “cry, of both the people and the earth” (n.18), because in the Amazon “the land is a theological place by which the faith is lived. It is also a unique source of God’s revelation” (n.19). The Amazon is not only a physical place, but “a reality full of life and wisdom” (n. 5), which rises to the level of a conceptual paradigm and calls us to a “pastoral, ecological and synodal” conversion (n. 5).

Indigenous Society and Beliefs Held Up as the Ideal

The point of departure is the failure of Soviet communism, incapable of realizing the Marxist utopia of a society without classes. The only people who historically achieved integral communism are the indigenous peoples of Latin America, who are particularly dense in the Amazon, a territory of about seven million square kilometers, 65% of which is in Brazil, with the remainder including territory of eight other South American countries. The communism of the indigenous peoples is expressed in a conception of the cosmos which includes a conception of society. The indigenist sociology is the consequence of a cosmology according to which there is no difference between people, animals, and plants, but all beings, both living and inanimate, are “citizens of the universe” and bear the same rights. “The new socio-ecological democracy does not only include human beings, but all beings who inhabit the cosmos: it is a “cosmocracy,”[3] a new “socio-cosmic pact.”[4] “The difference between living beings and ‘inert’ beings is in the degree of thickening of relationships.”[5]

In place of the United Nations’ Declaration of the Rights of Man, there is to be a declaration of the rights of the earth.[6] The earth is to be considered as a unity, comprising its physical-chemical structure and the living beings who dwell there. It is understood as “an organic macro-system, a living super-organism”[7] and ought to be considered as “the great and generous Pacha Mama (great mother) of the Andean culture, or as a living superorganism, the Gaia of Greek mythology and modern cosmology.”[8] “There is no difference between earth and humanity. They form an organic and systemic whole.”[9]

Boff, Teilhard de Chardin, and Pantheism

Leonardo Boff seeks to defend himself from the accusation of pantheism, defining himself as “panentheist.” Panentheism (from the Greek πᾶν “everything”, ἐν “in”, θεός “God”) is the theological position which maintains that God is immanent in the universe but at the same time transcends it. The word was first proposed by Karl Christian Frederick Krause (1781-1832), a student of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. Panentheism denies the existence of a God Who creates the universe ex nihilo as something distinct from Himself, instead proposing a creation that is continual and “processual.” God is the “self-conscience” of the universe, the universe which as it evolves becomes aware of its own evolution. He (God) “emerges from the global process of the world in evolution and expansion”[12]; “he is immanent in the world, participates in its open process, there he reveals himself and enriches himself.”[13]

Pagan Polytheism Lauded

The religious model closest to the ecotheology of liberation, according to Boff, is pagan polytheism, “with its rich pantheon of divinities populating all of the spaces of nature.”[18] Boff accuses Christianity of having “slipped, for reasons that are not always identifiable, into a sorrowful separation between God and nature,” thus depriving nature of its “magic” and “sacramentality.” “However we want to interpret it, we ought to recognize that the pagans had this extraordinary thing: they could see the presence of the gods in all things. In the woods, Pan and Sylvan, in the earth Terra Gais Demetra (Mother Earth) or Ceres, in the sun Apollo and Febo and so forth.”[19] In fact, primitive man, explains Boff, lived in a “mystical union” with nature.[20] He adored as divinity the rocks, the plants, the animals. Witchcraft and shamanism are expressions of this spirituality. “The shaman is one who enters into contact with the cosmic energies, he knows how to control the stream of energy within himself and even only with his presence or through gestures, dances, and rites he makes those energies beneficial for human needs in his search for equilibrium with nature and with himself.”[21]

The same polytheist and pantheist spirit characterizes the Instrumentum Laboris, in which we read:
According to the Vatican document:

Hence,
One can only imagine what St. Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles, would say in response to such incredible statements, he who wrote in his Epistle to the Romans concerning pagan peoples:


Church Must Don “An Amazonian Face”

Preparing for Battle

Pope Francis’s advisers for the Synod on the Amazon met secretly near Rome at the end of June in order to lay out their strategy, in a manner analogous to what the progressive theologians of Central Europe did on the eve of the Second Vatican Council. But the conservative group which opposed itself to them then was disorganized and unaware, with a few exceptions, of the maneuvers which were in progress. It took two years for them to constitute the Coetus Internationali Patrum, which united the anti-progressive bishops. Today, the group which unites those Catholics faithful to the perennial Magisterium of the Church is organized and combative.

Cardinal Walter Brandmüller has affirmed that the Instrumentum Laboris “contradicts the binding teaching of the Church on decisive points and thus it ought to be qualified as heretical,” and, given that the document places the very fact of divine revelation up for discussion “we ought also in addition to speak of apostasy.” The Instrumentum Laboris, concludes the cardinal, “constitutes an attack on the foundations of the faith, in a way in which was not thought possible until now. And thus it ought to be rejected with the maximum firmness.”

We also, like our adversaries, are preparing ourselves for battle in October with the intention of rejecting the Amazon project with the greatest firmness.

Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino.

[1] Leonardo Boff, The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. For a cosmic ecology, Cittadella, Roma 1996, p. 183

[2] Ibid., pp. 26-27.

[3] Ibid., p. 234.

[4] Leonardo Boff, Ethos mundial. Um consenso minimo entre os humanos, Letraviva, Brasila 2000, p. 116.

[5] Boff, The cry of the earth, p. 100.

[6] Boff, Ethos mundial, pp. 89-90; con riferimento a La Carta de la tierra: valores y principios para un futuro sostenible, San José, Costa Rica, 1999.

[7] Boff, Ethos mundial, p. 25.

[8] Boff, The cry of the earth, p. 27.

[9] Boff, Ethos mundial, p. 27.

[10] Boff, The cry of the earth, p. 61.

[11] Ibid., p. 45.

[12] Ibid., p. 248.

[13] Ibid., p. 259.

[14] Ibid., p. 253.

[15] Ibid., p. 258.

[16] Ibid., p. 42.

[17] Ibid., p. 269.

[18] Ibid., p. 353.

[19] Ibid., p. 355.

[20] Boff, Ethos mundial, p. 104.