From Sunday, more than 280 bishops, experts and ambassadors from all over the world will be advising the Amazon in the Vatican for three weeks. The meeting is prepared by a long hand, with his capitalism-critical eco-encyclical "Laudato Si '" Pope Francis had set the target in 2015.
The focus is on environmental and climate protection and the fight against social injustice and greed for profit at the expense of nature and man. Among other things, Francis was advised by the now emeritus but still fighting for the rights of the indigenous Amazon Bishop Erwin Kräutler, who also co-organized the synod.
The Amazon Synod is a matter of the heart of the Argentine pope. But it is also a forum that usually serves intra-church counterparts to carry out their feuds.
What are the main topics?
shortage of priests
There is a shortage of priests in Amazonia, which covers nine states and covers an area of 7.8 million square kilometers. While in Germany one clergyman looks after 2,000 Catholics, there are about 14,000 in the Amazon. As a result, in certain communities only a few times a year the Mass can be celebrated and the pastoral care suffers.
Consecrated family fathers?
The working paper on the Synod recommends that older, preferably indigenous and community-respected fathers should be ordained to receive the congregations. This consecration of the "Viri probati" is violently disputed within the church, as it is considered as a possible "gateway" of married devotees in the circle of celibates also far from the Amazon. Conservatives see celibacy threatened. Liberal forces are hoping for a snowball effect from the discussion about the ordination of married men.
Chris Bouroncle / AFP
The Pope in 2018 at a meeting with Indigenous people in the Peruvian city of Puerto Maldonado
According to the Pope, the "Viri probati" are just one of many topics at the Synod. "The services of evangelization will be important," he told the newspaper "La Stampa" - the proclamation of the Christian message.
mission
As the number of Catholics in the area falls, Evangelicals and Pentecostals have massively gained ground. Free churches also allow lay people to preach. Therein they are superior to the notoriously understaffed Catholic Church, where the few priests have to travel huge distances to even reach their communities.
"The classic missionary, colonial parameters" would no longer apply in relation to the indigenous, emphasizes the Essen Bishop Overbeck in an interview with the SPIEGEL. "Our church does not want to be clerical and patronizing, we are committed to dialogue and pastoral sensitivity."
Women in the church
The working paper on the synod praises the "indispensable ministry" women are already doing in the Church. Therefore gender equality debates should be promoted and women should increasingly be placed in leadership positions.
Emeritus Bishop Kräutler demands: "The Synod of Amazonia must not only honor the pastoral work of women, but allow women to consecrate deaconesses." Most grassroots communities in the Amazon were already run by women, yet they continued to play a subordinate role. "We are at least a hundred years behind the emancipation of women," said Kräutler the Latin America relief Adveniat.
Fernando Vergara / DPA
Indigenous Tikuna women during a catholic mass in Nazareth, Colombia
The internal church resistance is still great. The fact that bishops are discussing problems of laundering with Catholic women's rights activists - as was the case recently after the uprising of Maria 2.0 in Germany - is rather the exception in the universal church.
The president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, Thomas Sternberg, is skeptical: "The ordination of priests for women will most likely not be discussed in Rome," he says.
The head of the Bishops' Conference, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, emphasized in a conversation with protesting women's rights activists in Fulda: "I know it takes movement, I push and push, but sometimes things are slow."
German Catholics and the Synod
Debates in the Catholic world church are often dominated by local cultural conditions and sometimes diametrically contradict German discourse. Because Rome does not tolerate national outliers, many German Catholics argue for greater decentralization of the church.
"Even if we are only 23 million out of 1.4 billion - the voice of German Catholics is important at the Amazon Synod," says ZdK President Sternberg. The accusation that liberal forces from Germany would exploit the Synod to push through their agenda, he finds outlandish. Finally, every interest group tries to enforce their concerns, even the inhibitors and brakes. "Even those who hope that no results are achieved have an agenda."
Joao Laet / AFP
Burning rainforest in brazilian Altamira
Preservation of creation
Amazonian rainforests account for 40 percent of global tropical forests and save between 150 and 200 billion tons of carbon each year. But they have been massively cleared for years and decimated by fires. According to the Pope, deforestation in the Amazon means "killing humanity." The overexploitation of nature and man is exemplary here.
The situation in the Amazonian countries, which are already weakened by corruption and organized crime, is threatening, especially for indigenous peoples. Water is being privatized, forests destroyed to create monocultures. Mega projects such as dams lead to expulsion and environmental damage - those who protest against it are criminalized, threatened or even killed.
Emeritus Curia cardinal Claudio Hummes, a major figure in the synod as a general-relator, had described the human rights violations in Amazonia as dramatic in the summer. "Worse still, most of these crimes remain unpunished." Environment and society can not be separated. "It is a single and complex socio-ecological crisis."
How the Catholic Church ultimately wants to build enough moral or political pressure to sustain the creation in the Amazon is unclear.
