Papal Exhortation Calls for Synthesis in the Amazon

On February 12, Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation in response to the Special Assembly of the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, was published three months after the synod had concluded in October of last year.

Despite its regional focus, the document is addressed to “all the people of God and to people of good will,” in keeping with the pope’s insistence that maintaining the biological and cultural diversity of the Amazon is in the interest of all mankind. The exhortation is divided into four main sections corresponding with “four great dreams that the Amazon region inspires in [His Holiness].”

The chapters respectively deal with Pope Francis’ social, cultural, ecological and ecclesial dreams. In the first chapter, Pope Francis calls for outrage against the businesses colonizing the Amazon, for accompaniment with indigenous people in preserving their traditions, and for dialogue led by the poor. In the second chapter, His Holiness describes how the endangered cultures of the Amazon reflect God’s beauty and develop their own wisdoms. As such, he forcefully condemns the migration, commodification, and isolation of the Amazonian people that make intercultural encounter fruitless or impossible for the indigenous peoples. These economic criticisms continue into the pope’s chapter on his ecological dream, which largely repeats themes expressed in his 2013 encyclical Laudato Si. Beyond that, the chapter also includes a laudatory section on the Amazon’s water consisting of quotes from Brazilian, Chilean, and Colombian poetry.

The fourth, final, and longest chapter, which is particularly directed at Catholics, insists that the Church can become “incarnate” in new cultures without losing the truths of non-Christian cultures and without imposing foreign cultures onto them, resulting in a new synthesis  of the Gospel. Specifically, the pope commends what he sees as an awe towards nature in “indigenous mysticism” that he finds conducive towards a personal relationship with God. The pope cites “holiness with Amazonian features” going back 50 years as examples of this synthesis and recommends against quickly judging this synthesis of native religious practices and Catholicism as paganism, superstition, or idolatry. “The greatest danger would be to prevent them from encountering Christ by presenting Him as an enemy of joy or as someone indifferent to human questions and difficulties. Nowadays, it is essential to show that holiness takes nothing away from our “energy, vitality or joy,” the pope said.

His Holiness further argues that this synthesis should extend to the liturgy and that the expressions of the Amazon people should be incorporated into the celebration of the sacraments. This brings the pope to the problem of priestly shortages in the Amazon, which he responds to by calling for aspiring missionaries to decide on the Amazon and for bishops to form them with the knowledge to carry out that task. Further than that, the pope called for a special effort by the laity in growing Amazonian communities with their rich variety united in the Eucharist. This includes allowing women to take a central role in the services of the Church “that do not entail Holy Orders,” as they have done in the Amazon. All of this requires that the Church overcome pastoral and interreligious fear of conflicts and come to new solutions that take all possibilities as the early Christians did in reconciling their Judaism with the Greco-Roman cultures. The ecclesial section of the exhortation ends with a rhetorical question highlighting the unity all Christians share in their faith. The document then concludes with a brief prayer to Mary, whom the pope titles “the Mother of the Amazon.”

The exhortation does not include any references to the discipline of priestly celibacy. The Final Document of the Synod proposed that married deacons of good character be ordained to alleviate the extreme shortage of priests in the remote regions of the Amazon. The exhortation does not cite the Final Document outside of its introduction, where Pope Francis says that Querida Amazonia will neither “replace nor duplicate” the Final Document, and that he would prefer others to read it in full.