Following the decision on 29 June to establish an Amazon Ecclesial Conference, its president, Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, former archbishop of São Paulo, Brazil, and its vice-president, Bishop David Martínez de Aguirre, of Puerto Maldonado in southern Peru, have shed further light on the significance of the new body and how it will be structured. A key feature is its synodal nature, which will emphasise the participation of the laity, especially women and indigenous people.

Cardinal Hummes commented: “Following a suggestion from the Pope himself, this is not going to be an episcopal conference, like so many others, but what he has called the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon Region. The reason for this is that it is meant to be an expression of the synodal nature of the Church in the region…Like the Amazon Synod, where there were bishops who had a vote, but many others, laypeople, indigenous, with the right to speak, it is a Church that listens to the communities and with them looks for ways of evangelising that are incarnate and inculturated.”

Bishop Martínez de Aguirre went further and stressed that the new body is intended to be a model for the Church as a whole. “We can say that this could be considered a sort of experiment – I’m not sure if that’s the most appropriate word – for a new form of Church life, based on synodality, in which the bishop is no longer someone that leads the Church on his own, but someone who is part of the whole Church journey…As Pope Francis said in The Joy of the Gospel, the pastors are there, sometimes in front, sometimes in the middle and sometimes at the back.”