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Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò at the Rome Life Forum on May 18, 2018. Steve Jalsevac / LifeSiteNews

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ROME, August 2, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said that the upcoming Amazon synod is the triumph of a decades-long effort by Jesuits and their supporters to re-make the Catholic Church.  

“Where is the Christian message here?” Archbishop Viganò asked of the synod’s working document, which former Vatican doctrine chief Cardinal Gerhard Muller and dubia signer Cardinal Walter Brandmüller have criticized for spreading “false teaching” and as “heretical,” respectively. Archbishop Viganò discussed the working document in an interview with Dr. Robert Moynihan of Inside the Vatican.

“In fact, the figure of Christ is absent,” he noted. “The Synod working document testifies to the emergence of a post-Christian Catholic theology, now, in this moment. And this is very troubling. It is against everything I have worked for and believed for all my life.”

Viganò also charged that the working document shows influences of liberation theology, a theology developed in Latin America in the 1960s that sought to reconcile Catholic teachings with elements of revolutionary Marxism. Viganò suggested that Pope Francis, a Jesuit, is sympathetic to liberation theology. Jesuit priests have long been active in social causes in impoverished places in Latin America such as the Amazonian region. In his book The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, Fr. Malachi Martin chronicled the example set by Jesuit priests in armed struggles and revolutionary governments, such as Sandinista Nicaragua. 

Viganò is now carefully studying the history of the Jesuit order, he said. He called the current situation the “triumph of a 60-year-old plan, the successful execution of a well-thought out plan to bring a new sort of thinking into the heart of the Church, a thinking rooted in elements of Liberation Theology containing strands of Marxism, little interested in traditional Catholic liturgy or morality or theology, but rather focused on ‘praxis’ in the field of social justice. And now this plan has achieved one of its supreme goals, with a Jesuit on the See of Peter…”

Viganò, who formerly represented the Vatican to the United States as papal nuncio, gained attention in 2018 for a letter he wrote about the Vatican cover-up of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual predation. He revealed Pope Francis had reversed sanctions Pope Benedict XVI had privately placed on the now-disgraced prelate.

In July, Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan told LifeSiteNews that proponents of the Amazon synod care little for the spiritual needs of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin. They are instead, he asserted, seeking to implement “their own ideological agenda, which is a married clergy in Europe, and then to have it in the whole Latin Church.”

In June, LifeSiteNews interviewed author Julio Loredo, who wrote Liberation Theology, a life jacket for the poor made of lead (Teologia della liberazione. Un salvagente di piombo per i poveri) (Cantagalli, 2014). Loredo said the “untold” backstory of the Amazon synod is that it is intended to “change the whole Church” along the lines of “so-called indigenist and ecological theology” and from an “‘Amazonian’ point of view, which is nothing else than the culmination of liberation theology.” While much of the media is focused on issues such as the ordination of women, Loredo said, “This Synod is being prepared and staffed by a well-organized network of ‘indigenist’ associations and movements.” He asserted that key persons involved in the synod are connected to liberation theology. 

The Amazon Synod will take place in Rome from October 6 to 27.