Dr Nishant A.Irudayadason
Professor of Philosophy and Ethics,
Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune.
Amidst the media hype without serious thought process on some controversies on pagan ritual, ordination of married men to priesthood and women diaconate, the significance of the Amazon Synod is eclipsed. The Amazon Synod is to be seen first and foremost as how the Church sees its vocation in the contemporary scenario. It is pre-eminently prophetic insofar as it denounces the culture of greed that vandalizes the resources of the earth and systematically impoverishes the unprivileged. In his closing homily of the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon on 27 October 2017, Pope Francis clearly referred, to the cries came from the Amazon resonated for three weeks at the Vatican: “Let us pray for the grace to be able to listen to the cry of the poor: this is the cry of hope of the Church. The cry of the poor is the Church’s cry of hope.”
Following the same line of thought in Laudato Si’, Pope Francis sees a necessary connection between the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth. Recognizing that the amazon rainforest is a biological heart, which is unfortunately in a frenzied race towards death due to the massive destruction caused by human greed, the final document of the Synod laments that “the Amazon today is a wounded and deformed beauty, a place of pain and violence. The attacks on nature have negative consequences for the life of peoples.” The Synod constantly noted that the cry of the poor is first one to surface when creation is ruthlessly destroyed. The final text document gives a long list of the depredations suffered by the Amazonian population. While the images of the martyrs who gave their lives to defend the rights of indigenous peoples were displayed all through the Synod, the fathers of the Synod are resolutely committed to defending the rights of the indigenous peoples who are indignant at their “criminalization” and at the “voracious and predatory attitude” of other people in the region.
To respond to these cries, the Synod defines ecological sin as an act of omission against God, fellow humans and the environment. It is a “sin against future generations and manifests itself in acts and habits of pollution and destruction of the environmental harmony, transgressions against the principles of interdependence and the breaking of solidarity networks among creatures and against the virtue of justice.” The Synod thus invites us to a true integral conversion that gets manifested in a simple and sober life. Cardinal Hollerich, the Archbishop of Luxembourg sees this invitation as a reminder for Europe to assume responsibility. In his words, “there’s also a consumerist attitude in Europe, which provokes the burning of the forests in the Amazon, because we want to buy cheap meat and so on.” He sees it a vocation of the Church to voice out the social responsibility of the multinationals “through dialogue with politics to see how we can get ethics more into the economy and business world.”
Humanity must convert and understand that the current economic system that exploits the earth’s resources will not last long, warns Cardinal Ambongo, who hopes that the Synod will make a prophetic appeal to both politicians and corporations who are precipitating to devastate everything. There is an urgent need to change the economic model and it is the responsibility of the Church to play its prophetic role by sounding alarm. The Synod in unambiguous words states that the Church wants to be the “Samaritan Church, embodied in the way in which the Son of God became incarnate,” thus implying that she wants to assert the voice of the weakest amidst many oppositions from all quarters including from within.
