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Public Speaking PDF. Publications PDF. Racism PDF. Railroad in Education PDF. Reginald Hetherege PDF. Review of Dr. Sacred Poems, Ed. Bruce PDF. Secretary's Report PDF. Short Cruises PDF. The aggression towards this vital zone of Mother Earth and its inhabitants threatens their subsistence, their culture and their spirituality. It also affects the life of all humanity, particularly the poor, the excluded, the marginalized, the persecuted.
The present situation calls urgently for an integral ecological conversion. The extractive and agricultural projects that exploit the land with no consideration whatsoever are destroying this territory cf. LS 4, , which runs the risk of turning into savannah. One of them responds to great economic interests eager for oil, gas, wood, gold, agro-industrial monocultures, etc.
We are threatened by economic actors who implement an alien model in our territories. The logging companies enter the territory to exploit the forest. We take care of the forest for our children.
We have meat, fish, medicinal plants, fruit trees [ According to the consultations, the cries of the Amazon reflect three major causes of pain. Important examples are hydroelectric projects; legal and illegal mining associated with illegal garimpeiros informal miners who extract gold ; waterways projects which threaten the main tributaries of the Amazon River; hydrocarbon activities, livestock activities, deforestation, monoculture farming, agroindustry and grilagem appropriation of land using false documentation.
Many of these destructive projects in the name of progress are supported by local, national and foreign governments. This is what Pope Francis calls integral ecology.
Integral ecology is based on the recognition of being-in-relationships as a fundamental human category. This integral connectivity was regularly emphasized during the consultations with the communities of the Amazon. The Encyclical Laudato Si' nn. Human beings are part of the ecosystems that facilitate the relationships that give life to our planet; therefore the care of these ecosystems is essential.
And it is fundamental both for promoting the dignity of the human person and the common good of society, and for environmental care. The notion of integral ecology has been illuminating for the different perspectives that address the complex interactions between the environmental and the human, between management of the goods of creation and proposals for development and evangelization.
For the care of the Amazon, the aboriginal communities are indispensable interlocutors, since it is precisely they who normally take best care of their territories cf.
However, in order to promote integral ecology in the daily life of the Amazon, it is also necessary to understand the notion of intergenerational communication and justice, which includes the transmission of ancestral experience, cosmologies, spiritualities and theologies of the indigenous peoples in terms of care for our common home.
The struggle of our ancestors to fight for these rivers, for our territories, to fight for a better world for our children. To be specific, the cry of the Amazon speaks to us of struggles against those who want to destroy the life as conceived integrally.
Such forces are guided by an economic model linked to production, commerce and consumption, where the maximization of profit takes priority over human and environmental needs. In other words, the struggles oppose those who do not respect human rights and the rights of nature in the Amazon. LS 22 , especially among young people.
Life is linked and integrated into the territory, so the defence of life is the defence of the territory, there is no separation between the two aspects. The massive felling of trees, the extermination of the tropical forest by intentional forest fires, the expansion of the agricultural frontier and monocultures are the cause of the current regional climate imbalances, with obvious effects on the global climate, with planetary dimensions such as great droughts and increasingly frequent floods.
Creation is presented in the book of Genesis as a manifestation of life, sustenance, possibility and limit. In the first account Gn a the human being is invited to relate to creation in the same way as God does.
The challenge presented is great: How to recover the Amazon territory, rescue it from neocolonial degradation and restore its authentic and healthy well-being? To the aboriginal communities we owe their thousands of years of care and cultivation of the Amazon. In their ancestral wisdom they have nurtured the conviction that all of creation is connected, and this deserves our respect and responsibility.
The culture of the Amazon, which integrates human beings with nature, constitutes a benchmark for building a new paradigm of integral ecology. The Church should assume in its mission the care for our common home:.
In the Amazon territory, according to data from specialized Church institutions e. They live on the margins of society or in sporadic contact with it. These peoples live in deep connection with nature. Many of them have chosen to isolate themselves because they previously suffered traumas; others have been violently pushed aside by the economic exploitation of the Amazon.
The PIAVs resist the current model of predatory, genocidal and ecocidal economic development, opting for captivity in order to live in freedom cf.
PIAVs are vulnerable to threats from agro-industrial enterprises and from those who clandestinely exploit minerals, timber and other natural resources. They are also victims of drug trafficking, infrastructural mega-projects like hydroelectric dams and international highways, and illegal activities linked to the extractivist development model.
The risk of violence against women of these villages rose due to the presence of settlers, loggers, soldiers, and employees of resource industries, most of them men. Such violence and discrimination severely threatens the physical, spiritual and cultural survival of these indigenous peoples.
Add to this the lack of recognition of the territorial rights of indigenous peoples and of the PIAVs. Criminalizing their allies for their protests and cutting budgets meant to protect their lands make it even easier to invade their territories, thus further threatening their vulnerable lives. In view of this dramatic situation, and hearing such cries of the earth and of the poor cf. LS 49 , it would be opportune to:. Governments must implement all measures necessary to protect their physical integrity and that of their territories, based on the precautionary principle, or other protection mechanisms in accordance with international law, such as the specific Recommendations defined by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights IACHR of the OAS and contained in the last chapter of the report, Indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation and initial contact in the Americas It is also necessary to guarantee their freedom to abandon their isolation when they so desire.
In the Amazon, migration in search of a better life has been a historical constant. It is like a pendulum of coming and going, [25] of forced displacement within the same country and abroad, of voluntary migration from rural areas to the cities as well as international migration.
This transhumance [26] in the Amazon has not been well understood or sufficiently worked out from the pastoral point of view. They come in search of a better future for themselves and their families. They abandon poor, yet worthy lives. Many of them, in the hope that certain jobs will bring an end to their precarious situations, are drawn by the promising allure of gold mining. But let us not forget that gold can turn into a false god which demands human sacrifices.
The Amazon is among the regions with the highest levels of internal and international mobility in Latin America. The causes are socio-political, climatic and economic as well as ethnic persecution. The economic ones are mostly induced by political projects, mega-projects and extraction companies, which attract workers but at the same time expel the inhabitants of the affected areas.
Such migrations occur between countries of the Amazon such as the growing wave of migration from Venezuela or to other regions e. The phenomenon of migration, neglected both politically and pastorally, has contributed to social destabilization in the communities of the Amazon.
This has led many people to wander about and sleep in downtown areas, without work, without food, without shelter. Many of these belong to the indigenous peoples forced to abandon their lands. They are the destiny to which people turn after having been evicted from their territories. The city must be understood according to this model of exploitation: to empty the territories in order to appropriate them, to displace the populations and expel them into the city.
Young people also move in search of employment or underemployment to help maintain what is left of the family, abandoning their primary education and enduring all kinds of abuse and exploitation. In many regions of the Amazon, these young people are victims of drug trafficking, human trafficking or prostitution male and female.
The neglect of governments with regard to implementing quality public policies in the interior, mainly in education and health, allows this process of mobility to accelerate every day. Although the Church has accompanied this migratory flow, pastoral gaps remain in the interior of the Amazon region that need to be addressed.
What do migrants expect from the Church? How can we help them more effectively? How can we promote integration between migrants and the local community?
All this will require preparation of the head and heart of pastoral agents in order to face this critical situation. The problem of migration needs to be dealt with in a coordinated manner, especially by churches on the border. Despite speaking today of the Amazon as the lung of the planet cf.
LS 38 and the breadbasket of the world, the devastation of the region and poverty have caused a great displacement of the population in search of a better life.
As the number of cities increases, the number of inhabitants in rural populations decreases. However, the question of urbanization encompasses not only the displacement of people and the growth of cities, but also the transmission of a particular metropolitan lifestyle. Its pattern reaches into the rural world, modifying habits, customs, and traditional ways of living.
Culture, religion, the family, the education of children and youth, employment and other aspects of life change rapidly to respond to the new calls from the city.
Introducing the Amazon into the globalized market produced more exclusion, as well as an urbanization of poverty. According to the responses to the Preparatory Document Questionnaire, the main problems that have arisen with urbanization are the following:. A cosmic dimension of experience cosmovivencia palpitates within the families. It draws on age-old traditional knowledge and practices in different fields such as agriculture, medicine, hunting and fishing, in harmony with God, nature and the community.
In short, the family is where one learns to live in harmony: between peoples, between generations, with nature, in dialogue with the spirits. The family in the Amazon has been a victim of colonialism in the past and of neo-colonialism in the present. Today, the imposition of a western extractivist economic model once again affects families by invading and destroying their lands, their cultures and their lives, forcing them to emigrate to the cities and their peripheries.
The current accelerating changes affect the family in the Amazon. Thus we find new family structures: single-parent families headed by a woman; an increase in separated families, consensual unions and assembled families; and fewer institutional marriages.
In addition, one still finds women being subjugated within the family, while family violence, absentee parents, teenage pregnancies and abortions are on the rise.
The family in the city is a place of synthesis where traditional and modern cultures meet. However, families often suffer from poverty, precarious housing, lack of work, increased consumption of drugs and alcohol, discrimination and juvenile suicide.
In addition, there is a lack of dialogue between generations in families; traditions and language are lost. Families also face new health problems; there is a need for adequate education about motherhood.
One also finds a lack of attention to women in pregnancy and the pre-partum and post-partum phases. The Pan-Amazon is abundantly multicultural, therefore the greatest contribution is to continue fighting to preserve its beauty by strengthening the community-family structure of its peoples.
To this end, the Church must value and respect cultural identities. In particular, it should:. Women must assume a leadership role within the Church. A family pastoral ministry of integral accompaniment, which does not exclude the wounded family. A sacramental pastoral ministry that strengthens and comforts everyone and excludes no one.
Ongoing formation of pastoral agents that takes into account the recent synods and the realities of Amazon families. A family pastoral ministry in which the family is both subject and protagonist. Corruption in the Amazon seriously affects the lives of its peoples and territories. There are at least two types of corruption: one which exists outside the law and the other which is protected by legislation that betrays the common good.
In recent decades, investment in the exploitation of the riches of the Amazon region by large companies has accelerated. Many of them pursue profit at all costs without caring about the socio-environmental damage they cause.
The governments that authorize such practices, in need of foreign exchange to promote their public policies, do not always fulfill their duty to protect the environment and the rights of their populations. Thus corruption snares the political, judicial, legislative, social, ecclesial and religious authorities who receive benefits in exchange for permitting the actions of these companies cf.
DAp There are cases in which large companies and governments have fashioned systems of corruption. Some individuals who held public office are currently being tried, are in jail or have fled. A culture is thus created that poisons the state and its institutions, permeating all social strata, including indigenous communities.
This is truly a moral scourge; as a result, trust in institutions and their representatives is lost, politics and social organizations are totally discredited. The Amazon peoples are no strangers to corruption, and they become its main victims. Considering the clear lack of economic means of the particular Churches in the Amazon, special attention should be paid to the origin of donations or other kinds of benefits, as well as to investments made by church institutions or Christians.
The Episcopal Conferences could offer a service of advice and accompaniment, of consultation and promotion of common strategies in the face of widespread corruption and also to address the need to generate and invest resources to support pastoral work.
A careful analysis is needed in the face of drug trafficking. The Amazon region today contains the greatest diversity of flora and fauna in the world, and its native population has an integral sense of life not contaminated by economic materialism.
The Amazon is a healthy territory in its long and fruitful history, although there was no shortage of diseases. The model of development focused exclusively on the economic exploitation of the forest, mining and hydrocarbon wealth of the Pan-Amazon affects the health of the Amazon biomes, their communities, and the entire planet! LS 22 , the disciples of Christ are called to promote a culture of care and health. Commitment to health care therefore demands urgent changes in personal lifestyles and in structures.
Deforestation in the Amazon will prevent us from sharing in such riches, impoverishing future generations. Currently, the extinction rate of species in the Amazon due to human activities is a thousand times greater than from natural processes. The only way to preserve this wealth is to take care of the territory and the Amazon rainforest and to empower the indigenous people and citizens.
Indigenous rituals and ceremonies are essential for integral health because they integrate the different cycles of human life and nature. They create harmony and balance between human beings and the cosmos. They protect life from evils that can be caused by both human beings and other living beings. They help to cure diseases that harm the environment, human life and other living beings.
Health care of the inhabitants involves detailed knowledge of medicinal plants and other traditional elements that are part of healing processes. To this end, indigenous peoples rely on people who, throughout their lives, specialize in observing nature and in listening to and collecting the knowledge of the elderly, especially women.
But because of environmental pollution, both nature and the bodies of people in the Amazon are deteriorating. Contact with new toxic elements such as mercury causes new diseases to appear that were unknown until now by the elderly healers.
All this puts this ancestral wisdom at risk. That is why the responses to the Preparatory Document emphasize the need to preserve and transmit the knowledge of traditional medicine. Faced with these new diseases, inhabitants are forced to buy medicines from pharmaceutical companies using the same plants from the Amazon.
Once marketed, these drugs are beyond their financial reach for reasons that include patenting of drugs and overpricing. Therefore, it is proposed to value traditional medicine, the wisdom of the elders and indigenous rituals, and at the same time to facilitate access to medicines that cure new diseases.
But it is not only medicinal herbs and medicines that aid healing. Clean water and air, and healthy food, the fruit of their own cultivation, gathering, hunting and fishing, are necessary conditions for the integral health of indigenous peoples. Finally, it is proposed to evaluate the health structures of the Church, such as hospitals and health centres, in terms of integral health available to all the inhabitants who count on traditional medicine as part of their health programmes.
We forget that we have our roots, that we belong to an original people, and we are allowing ourselves to be carried away by technology. It is not bad to walk with both feet, to know the modern and also to take care of the traditional. Consulta, Ecuador. Through mutual listening to peoples and nature, the Church transforms into a Church that goes out in both geographical and structural ways, and a Church that is sister and disciple through synodality.
He himself became a disciple in Puerto Maldonado by expressing his willingness to listen to the voice of the Amazon. Education implies an encounter and an exchange in which values are assimilated. Every culture is rich and poor at the same time. Because it is historical, culture always has a pedagogical dimension of learning and improvement. This education, which develops through encounter, is different from an education that seeks to impose on the other and especially on the poor and vulnerable the very worldviews which are precisely the cause of their poverty and vulnerability.
Education in the Amazon does not mean imposing cultural parameters, philosophies, theologies, liturgies and strange customs on the Amazon peoples. Education in an integral ecology encompasses all the constitutive relationships of individuals and peoples. In order to understand this vision of education, it is worth applying the same principle as in health: the goal is to observe the whole body and the causes of the disease and not only the symptoms.
Indigenous peoples have a teaching-learning method based on oral tradition and experiential practice with a contextualized pedagogical process within each stage. The challenge is to integrate this method in the dialogue with other educational proposals. The formation plans must reflect a philosophical-theological culture adapted to the cultures of the Amazon, capable of being understood and therefore of nourishing Christian life.
Indigenous theology and ecotheology ought to be integrated for this very reason: this will prepare them for the listening and open dialogue in which evangelization takes place. It is proposed to reform the structures of the seminars in order to facilitate the integration of candidates for the priesthood in the communities. Schools: educational plans are needed to focus on education that reflects one's own culture and respects native languages, an integral education that responds to one's own reality, in order to deal with school dropouts and illiteracy, especially among women.
University: it is necessary to promote not only an inter-disciplinary orientation but also to address issues in a trans-disciplinary manner, that is to say, favouring an approach that restores unity in diversity to human knowledge, along the lines of the study of an integral ecology according to the prologue of the Apostolic Constitution Veritatis Gaudium.
The teaching of Pan-Amazon indigenous theology is requested in all educational institutions. It is desirable to deepen existing Amazonian Indian theology, which will allow for a better and greater understanding of indigenous spirituality and thus avoid committing the historical errors that have violated many original cultures.
It is requested, for example, to take into account the original myths, traditions, symbols, knowledge, rites and celebrations that include transcendent, community and ecological dimensions. A fundamental aspect of the root of human sin is to detach oneself from nature and not recognize it as part of the human and to exploit nature without limits, thus breaking the original covenant with creation and with God Gen After the ruptures of sin and the universal flood, God re-establishes the covenant with man himself and with creation Gen , calling upon humanity to care for it.
The reconciliation with creation to which Pope Francis invites us cf. LS presupposes above all that we overcome passivity — like the passive attitude of King David refusing to take charge of his mission cf. Likewise the Church can be tempted to remain closed in on herself, renouncing her mission of proclaiming the Gospel and of making the Kingdom of God present.
On the contrary, an outgoing Church is a church confronts the sins of this world from which it is not alien cf. This sin, as St. John Paul II said, is not only personal but also social and structural Cf. Christ redeems all of creation submitted by humanity to sin Rom Therefore, conversion must also have the same levels of concreteness: personal, social and structural, bearing in mind the various dimensions of relationality.
This conversion implies recognizing personal and social complicity in the structures of sin, unmasking the ideologies that justify a lifestyle that assaults creation. We often hear stories that justify the destructive actions of power groups that exploit nature, dominate its inhabitants in a despotic manner cf. LS 56, , and ignore the cries of pain of the earth and of the poor cf.
The process of conversion to which the Church is called involves unlearning, learning and relearning. This path requires a critical and self-critical regard that allows us to identify what we need to unlearn , what harms our common home and its inhabitants.
We need to take an inner journey to find the attitudes and mentalities that prevent us from connecting with ourselves, with others and with nature. Their daily life gives testimony to contemplation, care and relationship with nature.
They teach us to recognize ourselves as part of the biome and as co-responsible for its present and future care. Conversion is presented in Sacred Scripture as a movement that goes from sin to friendship with God in Jesus Christ; that is why it belongs to the process of faith Mk Beholding the reality of the Amazon with believing eyes has made us appreciate the work of God in creation and its peoples, but we also observe the presence of evil at various levels: colonialism dominion , an economicist-mercantilist mentality, consumerism, utilitarianism, individualism, technocracy, throwaway culture.
Unmask the new forms of colonialism present in the Amazon. Identify and critically analyze the new ideologies that justify ecocide in the Amazon.
Denounce the structures of sin at work in the Amazonian territory. Identify the reasons with which we justify our participation in the structures of sin in order to analyze them critically.
Promote habits of behaviour, production and consumption, recycling and reuse of waste. Salvage myths and update community rites and celebrations that contribute significantly to the process of ecological conversion. Thank the native peoples for their care of the territory through time and recognize in this the ancestral wisdom that forms the basis for a good understanding of integral ecology. The local Church formally to recognize the special ministry of pastoral agents who promote care for our common home.
Would that the Lord might bestow his spirit on them all! The proclamation of Jesus Christ and having a profound encounter with Him through conversion and the ecclesial experience of the faith presuppose a welcoming and missionary Church that is incarnated in cultures.
She must keep in mind the steps that have been taken in response to the challenging themes of the centrality of the kerygma and of the mission in the area of the Amazon. This is a personal conversion story that reads like an adventure novel one cannot put down. Trained by her scientist father to identify and uncover ancient treasures, our driven protagonist spends a lifetime on the hunt, engaging both heart and head as she tracks down first what is desirable, then what is meaningful, until, finally — working her way through the clinging vines of conventions, the rolling hazards of memory and the brutal realities of suffering — she locates a priceless and eternal prize that had always awaited her.
Intellectually satisfying, spiritually affirming and populated with peripheral characters that make you wish you knew them, too, Something Other Than God is an authentic and authentically entertaining must-read!
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