Post by Deleted on Oct 22, 2019 18:45:29 GMT -5
During his campaign, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said he would change his country’s policies concerning the protection of the environment and the concession of federal lands to indigenous peoples. It is a promise he has kept since taking office. The accelerating devastation of the Amazon rainforest and the increasing encroachment on indigenous reservations since he assumed the presidency in January have worried members of the Catholic Church in the region, who are trying to help local people resist the new strategy of occupation of the rainforest.
“Bolsonaro doesn’t have any project for the country. For the Amazon, his outdated and anti-ecological strategy contradicts science and a Chico Mendes’s saying: ‘The Amazon is more valuable preserved than devastated,’” said Leonardo Boff, one of the leaders of the liberation theology movement and a longtime environmentalist.
The rate of deforestation in the Amazon from January to the end of September increased 93 percent compared to the same period in 2018, according to the National Space Research Institute, the governmental agency that monitors via satellite the destruction of the rainforest.
Mr. Boff is one of the signatories of a recent statement, distributed among Latin American theologians and members of Latin American indigenous associations, urging that the Amazon region be protected as an “intangible sanctuary of the common house.” The document was produced by the Indigenous People’s Foundation of Ecuador, an organization founded in the 1980s by members of the Ecuadorian church to promote the rights of indigenous peoples.
It was presented to the bishops gathered in Rome for the Synod for the Pan-Amazon region and calls for the church to declare the Amazon “a sacred land” and for “urgent and deep measures” by “world organs and the states in charge [of the Amazon]” in order to “save life on the planet.”
But rainforests are not the only things under threat in the Amazon region. There has also been an uptick in the level of direct violence against the native peoples. A report released by the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council, a commission of the National Conference of the Bishops of Brazil, found that the number of cases of invasion, illegal exploitation of natural resources and damage caused by invaders of indigenous lands went from 96 in 2017 to 109 in 2018. In the first nine months of 2019, C.I.M.I. registered 160 cases.
“In our region, I can say that at least 90 percent of the indigenous reservations are currently suffering invasions and illegal exploitation,” said Cleanton Curioso, a regional coordinator for C.I.M.I. in the city of Altamira, in the Amazonian state of Pará.
Mr. Curioso attributes the feeling of impunity among land grabbers, illegal miners and illegal loggers to the election of Mr. Bolsonaro. “These people said out loud that as
soon as Bolsonaro took power they would invade every reservation in the region,” he said. Those problems are certainly not new, Mr. Curioso said, but “illegal activities that used to be secret are now shamelessly carried out.”
As attacks on indigenous lands increase, the power of the enforcement agencies is on the decline. Mr. Curioso said C.I.M.I. and indigenous peoples have repeatedly reported the invasions to the police or the government agencies of environmental and indigenous protection, and no one has intervened.
“Those agencies are very weak now. At times the officers are attacked by gunfire as they arrive to the scene,” he said.
The invaders are usually interested in taking as much wood as they can, clearing whole areas of forest that can later be exploited by miners or used as pastures by ranchers. According to Mr. Curioso, their actions seem to be orchestrated.
This dynamic of invasion and deforestation also affects peasant and quilombola—descendants of African slaves who fled captivity and settled in rural areas—communities in the Amazon.
Gustavo Cepolini, a geography professor at the State University of Montes Claros, explained that both the cleared land and the Amazonian subsoil are allotted to invaders. “The mining interests are present everywhere in the rainforest. So, peasants, quilombolas and indigenous peoples are really protecting not only trees and land but also the subsoil of the Amazon,” he said.
In 2017, Mr. Cepolini coordinated a project to map the land conflicts all over the Amazon at the request of the Pastoral Land Commission, another committee affiliated with the Brazilian bishops. The survey showed that land violence is a longstanding and widespread phenomenon in the Amazon. “But now the attackers count on the legitimacy that has been given to them by the president himself,” Mr. Cepolini said.
Through its organizations and dioceses, the Catholic Church has denounced land invasions in the Amazon region and tried to help victims. Commissions like C.I.M.I. and C.P.T. also play an institutional role in the capital city of Brasília, trying to influence politicians to prevent the current laws of environmental and indigenous protection from being misapplied. Since July, C.I.M.I. has organized talks with members of the Barzilian congress to convince them of the risks associated with Mr. Bolsonaro’s plan to allow mining in indigenous lands—something that is currently forbidden. The project, which also includes the possibility of using indigenous lands for agribusiness, has not yet been approved by the legislature.
“Resisting [the attacks against the Amazon] and helping the people to reflect on these issues are a daily challenge and different organizations of the church are currently very engaged in it,” said Mr. Cepolini.
A recent survey commissioned by the Global Catholic Climate Movement and other nongovernmental organizations showed that the concrete activities of the church to protect the Amazon are likely backed up by the Catholic people in Brazil. Sixty-seven percent of the 1,502 interviewees said they oppose reducing indigenous reservations; 75 percent of the respondents said they oppose the end of environmental fees for people who devastate the Amazon. (One of Mr. Bolsonaro’s electoral promises was to put an end to what he called an “environmental fine spree” in Brazil.) Seventy-three percent said they do not support the weakening of the Brazilian environmental protection agency.
www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/10/22/what-catholic-church-doing-protect-amazon-bolsonaros-brazil?utm_source=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_campaign=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_medium=PANTHEON_STRIPPED&utm_term=PANTHEON_STRIPPED
The unique challenges missionaries face in the Amazon
The ongoing Synod for the Pan-Amazon Region—to be concluded on Oct. 27 in
Rome—must address the region’s challenges through a creative combination of
respect for the Catholic tradition and openness to local realities. That is the
assessment of the sociologist Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto, the coordinator of the
Center of Faith and Culture at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.
According to priests and women religious who have worked in the Amazon for
decades, the particularities of the Catholic mission in the region—especially the lack
of clergy to attend to thousands of geographically isolated communities—has led
them to make hard choices. Over the years, new ways of pastoral care have had to be
tested, usually derived from local habits, traditions and cultures.
“It needs to be clear that the Amazon—as well as great portions of the South
American countryside—historically suffered from a very serious lack of priests.
The
consequence was the formation of a popular form of Christianity, in which the
absence of a basic religious education prevented the people from grasping the
differences between the several Christian denominations,” Mr. Borba said.
According to priests and women religious who have worked in the Amazon for decades, the
particularities of the Catholic mission in the region—especially the lack of clergy to attend to
thousands of geographically isolated communities—has led them to make hard choices
.
This situation not only accounts for the recent progress of neo-Pentecostalism in the
Amazon region but also has led to a kind of Catholicism mainly based on the popular
devotion of saints—and not in the sacraments.
A historical tradition of the church in the Amazon has been the desobriga (from the
Portuguese verb desobrigar, meaning “to disoblige” or “to release”), in which a
bishop or priest visits several communities that have gone up to 15 years without the
presence of a member of the clergy and administer all the sacraments at once.
Nowadays, visits are more frequent, but many faraway communities still receive a
priest no more than once a year.
“The other day, I traveled to celebrate a Mass at a community that hadn’t seen a
priest for two years,” the Rev. João Carlos Andrade Silveira of the city of Anapu, in
the Brazilian state of Pará, told America. It was one of 70 communities in Anapu, a
city with a total area of 11,900 square kilometers—bigger than a country like
Kosovo, for instance.
“In the meantime, they lead their lives, praying the rosary and doing weekly
celebrations of the Word—which they usually call ‘service’ due to the influence of
the evangelicals,” said Father Silveira. In many communities, Eucharistic ministers
and catechists play the role of religious leaders, doing baptisms and witnessing
matrimonies.
Women religious also play a central role in Amazonian communities. They certainly
outnumber the priests and seem to reach more places. The way they are seen by the
people—sometimes akin to priests—is a natural result of their work.
When Sister Ivone Oliveira first arrived in the Amazon, 20 years ago, she spent six
years in the northern Brazilian state of Rondônia, in a parish that did not have a
priest. She and her colleagues had to ensure that all the 24 communities of the
region were visited, doing baptisms and matrimonies and also offering classes of
religious and social education. Over time, they also formed lay community leaders.
Women religious also play a central role in Amazonian communities. They certainly outnumber
the priests and seem to reach more places. The way they are seen by the people—sometimes
akin to priests—is a natural result of their work.
“Many people would come to us and say they needed to confess their sins. We
always made clear we couldn’t forgive them in the name of the church. But we
obviously listened to them, gave them a blessing and a hug,” she told America. But
if the nuns understood that a priest was important for a given occasion, they would
make a huge effort to bring one to the city.
After a few years, when finally a priest settled in the region, people still asked to
“confess” first with a nun. “They trusted us very much and used to ask us if they
could tell this or that to the priest,” said Sister Oliveira. “Many of them were
traumatized with ancient priests that were too moralistic and yelled at them
depending on the sin. The priest gave us full support on this task.”
Luigi Ceppi, an Italian-born priest who has been living in the Brazilian state of Acre
for decades, remembers some hard decisions he has had to make. “After one day of
‘desobriga’ in a very faraway community—it took us 15 days traveling on a boat to
get there—I was approached by a family who wanted to baptize their kids. They
heard we were there and came to us,” he told America.
Father Ceppi asked them about their knowledge of Jesus Christ, Catholic prayers and
so on. “They told me they didn’t know much about any of that. I was in doubt if I
should baptize them under those circumstances. But then they told me they had
traveled for 18 days to get to me, through the rivers and the forest.”
So he decided to baptize them. “What was more important: the effort they made or
the sacrament’s doctrine, the need of a preparatory course and so on? They were
very happy to know they were the children of God.”
Sister Miriam Spezia, who lives in Acre near the borders of Peru and Bolivia,
explained that for many people in the region, baptism is seen as an obligation, but
they do not view the other sacraments in the same way. “Their experience of
10/22/2019 The unique challenges missionaries face in the Amazon | America Magazine
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religion in our region is largely based on the Gospel, the collective reflection on it
and its concrete application in their daily lives,” she said. She has been working in
the region for 30 years, but she said that only in the last five years has the parish
regularly seen a priest.
The vast distances and lack of infrastructure are constant obstacles for Catholic
missionaries in the Amazon. “We normally schedule a week or two to visit the
riverside communities, but it’s too expensive for us. What keeps their faith while
nobody visits them is their devotion to saints,” explained Sister Vilma Padilha from
the city of Borba, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. “In some communities, there
are men who certainly could assume some kind of priesthood, in case the synod
approves the possibility of the viri probati [certain married priests]. This would be a
great help.”
The lengthy and frequent travel required under the current model of the Amazonian
church is also costly for communities that are often struggling financially. “This
year the communities in our region are very happy because despite their poverty
they were able to contribute with 22,000 reais,” about $5,350, “to the parish. But
our annual expenditure with transportation equals 20,000,” about $4,870, said
Sister Oliveira.
www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/10/15/unique-challenges-missionaries-face-amazon
Latin American church leaders call for church with 'Amazonian face'
www.americamagazine.org/issue/latin-american-church-leaders-call-church-amazonian-face
Indigenous Catholics hope Amazon Synod will strengthen connection to the church
www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/09/30/indigenous-catholics-hope-amazon-synod-will-strengthen-connection-church
Oh my so much is currently being worked on in Rome at the Vatican with all the worlds Bishops present to address this most important period in our history and safe guard ot from further degradation and ruin. We must find ways to protect the Earth's Lungs and address the faith of those people living there.
For your reading pleasure.