VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis has canonically erected the “Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon” to promote the agenda of the Amazon Synod and continue to act as the “testing ground” for changes in the wider Church, possibly including female deacons or married priests.
In an October 9 audience, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, was given papal approval of the new “Ecclesial Conference” envisaged by the 2019 Amazon Synod.
Paragraph 115 of the final document of the Amazon Synod called for a “synodal structure” for the Amazon, which would allow it to develop its own regional form of Catholicism and incorporate its native traditions into its religious practices.
The final document reads:
We propose the creation of a Bishops’ organism that promotes synodality among the churches of the region, helps to express the Amazonian face of this Church and continues the task of finding new paths for the evangelizing mission, especially incorporating the proposal of integral ecology, thus strengthening the physiognomy of the Church in the Amazon. It would be a permanent and representative Bishops’ organism that promotes synodality in the Amazon region, connected with CELAM, with its own structure, in a simple organization and also connected with REPAM. So constituted, it can be the effective instrument in the territory of the Latin American and Caribbean Church for taking up many of the proposals that emerged in this Synod. It would be the nexus for developing Church and socio-environmental networks and initiatives at the continental and international levels.
Cardinal Ouellet noted how during a June 2020 assembly, the Pope was asked to canonically erect an Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon, a request which he was “well disposed to favor,” resulting in the creation of the Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon (CEAMA) that month, although it did not receive canonical status at that point.
Pope Francis instructed the Congregation for Bishops to “follow and accompany the process closely,” and to give “every assistance” to the body.
Now, in the October 9 audience with Cardinal Ouellet, Pope Francis has “canonically erected the Conferencia Eclesial de la Amazonía as a public ecclesiastical juridical person, giving it the purpose of promoting the common pastoral action of the ecclesiastical circumscriptions of Amazonia and encouraging greater inculturation of the faith in the said territory.”
Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, the president of CEAMA, reportedly made the request for official recognition on September 30. The statutes of the new ecclesial body are now due to be submitted to the Pontiff for his study and subsequent approval.
New Ecclesial Conference pushes agenda of Amazon Synod
With the new Ecclesial Conference established in light of the Amazon Synod, it will likely seek to implement measures outlined in the synod itself and its controversial final document. Paragraph 115 of the document, which gave birth to the new Ecclesial Conference, states that such a body would promote “integral ecology … synodality,” as well as “many of the proposals that emerged in this Synod.”
Among the many proposals raised by the Amazon Synod and its final document are the opening of the clerical state to women and the admitting of married men ordained to the priesthood, in an attempt to make the Church more appealing to Catholics in the region.
Further proposals include a “synodal structure” for the Amazon (paragraph 112-115), which would allow it to develop its own regional form of Catholicism and incorporate its native traditions into its religious practices.
Additionally, and based on the Second Vatican Council’s defense of “liturgical pluralism,” the document called for “a rite for native peoples” which would be based on their “worldview, traditions, symbols and original rites that include transcendent, community and ecological dimensions.”
This “Amazonian rite” would “expresses the liturgical, theological, disciplinary and spiritual heritage of the Amazon,” which would assist the “work of evangelization.”
Evangelization itself is mentioned often in the synod’s final document, although without clarification, and in the context of a multiculturalist agenda: “The evangelization that we propose today for [the] Amazon is the inculturated proclamation that generates processes of interculturality: processes that promote the life of the Church with an identity and an Amazonian face” (paragraph 55).
Pope Francis later released his 2020 Apostolic Exhortation on the synod, Querida Amazonia, to “officially present” the final document, amid great confusion as to whether the final document, or the exhortation, were part of the magisterium. After questioning from the press, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni declared: “The apostolic exhortation is magisterium. The final document is not magisterium.”
Listed in the exhortation were “four great dreams” of Pope Francis, focused on the “rights of the poor,” the preservation of the area’s “distinctive cultural riches” including the “rivers and forests,” and “giving the Church new faces with Amazonian features.”
New conference is the testing ground for the Church
The erection of the new Ecclesial Conference of the Amazon (CEAMA), was welcomed by the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM), who wrote how the news filled the “Latin American and Caribbean Church with joy as it endeavors to proclaim synodality, collegiality and integral conversion with a prophetic voice, by integrating our networks, promoting decentralization and sustaining his Magisterium.”
It was also welcomed by the Pontifical Academy for Life, which retweeted an image of the papal announcement, and by CEAMA’s executive secretary, Jesuit Fr. Alfredo Ferro, who stated how it was a response to the Pope’s call for “synodality.”
“New winds from the Spirit are blowing in this Church,” said Fr. Ferro of the news, in light of the multi-year synod on synodality, which the Pope has described as an opportunity to become “a different Church.”
Indeed, LifeSite has previously reported how CEAMA’s vice-president Peruvian Bishop David Martinez de Aguirre Guinea of Puerto Maldonado, noted that the new conference would be the “testing ground” for the wider Church, and “a practical application of the Second Vatican Council in this form of Church life,” including the promotion of “women as protagonists in the Church.”
LifeSiteNews contacted the Holy See press office for further clarification on the news, but received no answer.
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