This will keep them and the press busy, so that the real danger to the Catholic faith can be ignored: that the document is about eco theology, not about Jesus. And it fits in with the "Green" and "global warming" propaganda, which is supposed to save the earth, but is actually about imposing a NWO of socialism on the world.
The document posits the Amazon as a garden of Eden that should inspire us or something.
Respect the river and honor it.
or as the Vatican says;
The original Amazonian peoples have much to teach us. For thousands of years they have taken care of their land, water and forest, and have managed to preserve them to this day so that humanity can benefit of the free gifts of God's creation. New paths of evangelization must be built in dialogue with ancestral wisdom in which the seeds of the Word are manifested.
but why the Amazon? Why not the rivers of China, whose irrigation system has supported the oldest continuous civilization on earth? Last time I looked, they had a lot of ancestral wisdom too.
Why not the Nile or the Mississippi for that matter?
Because it is pristine I guess.
Except it is not: Up until western diseases depopulated the area, the folks there lived in villages and changed the environment with raised farming areas, fishing weirs, and paths from village to village.
video lecture here, or read the book 1491.... video about that book.
European diseases caused a population collapse however.
So what is left is not the ancient customs, but the survivors who live on a more primitive level than their ancestors. Their numbers are few, of course, because primitive living means you die young, and some the young decided to leave home to find a better life.
I have worked my way through half the document so far, and it's a bunch of basic stuff about development, indigenous rights, pollution, corruption by those developing the land, migration to urban areas, etc.
The document reads as if this is new, and someone just noticed it.
Hello!
The problem? None of these problems are limited to the Amazon basin, nor are they new.
Indeed, Pope Gregory the great wrote about these problems way back in 590 AD, when he had to cope with refugees from invasions, corrupt government, basic services for the people of Rome, and while he was at it, sent missionaries to the indigenous tribes of Britain, instructing them to find out what was good in the culture and traditional religion, and then to incorporate those practises compatible with Christianity and to reconsecrate the shrines into churches when possible. (Similar to Paul presenting a logical Christianity to the Greeks).
and not just St Gregory: history is full of the church's outreach doing these things over the last 2000 years.
But none of this is mentioned in the document for some reason.
I had to learn about different cultures because I worked with people of other cultures as a physician.
You let them do things that are useful or harmless, while trying to stop them from harmful practises. This is hard work. But my point is that cultures do change, no matter what you do, so there is a many faceted approach to improve people's lives with the least amount of harm.
but if you read the Amazon Synod document, you'd think no one ever thought of finding out how people think and act and feel, and incorporate their beliefs and societal practises into the faith.
But of course, what the document implies is that the church needs to be changed by the dialogue, because one can learn so much from these people. (italics mine).
And this is the real "camel's nose in the tent": Because it implies changing Christianity to a new age gnosticism and an agenda that implies everyone should devolve to the primitive.
The ex editor of the British Catholic newspaper the Herald calls the document
"PC Disney production... Avatar written by octagenarian European socialists..." (Video link... go to 10 minutes)
An Italian monk calls it "biodegradable Christianity".
Commenting on the document’s focus on the Amazon as an “epiphanic” source of revelation, Dom Meiattini says the apostolic, scriptural, and liturgical tradition of the Church “are covered by vines and tropical molds or sunk in marshy quicksand.”...
...Dom Meiattini also claims that the working document’s fascination with the “world of the primitive,” i.e. the “childhood of mankind,” betrays an infantile regression. “After the attempts of the flower children, what is now being proposed is a cultural model which is ecologically more sustainable and as minimally neurotic as possible: life brought back to its beginnings, to bows and arrows, to shamanic healing rituals,” he writes.yup. Forget the Penicillin: all you need is a "shamanic healing ritual". Penicillin is a product of modern western Civilization with it's emphasis on science and reason (and probably manufactured in China, which has been civilized for about 5000 years).
And it gets worse.
At least one of the tribes extolled as wonderful has a couple of problems that the document seems to have overlooked.
Awhile back, I linked to a UK Telegraph story about one of the Amazon tribes that the Vatican extols for their wisdom. The Telegraph story tells about how the "elders" order parents to kill imperfect children, how sometimes parents killed themselves instead of doing this, and how some Protestant missionaries are trying to stop them, while the PC anthropologists say, hey it's their culture, so don't interfere with them.
except of course that anthropologists already interfered with them, slept with their kids, and some doctors gave them measles vaccine that turned out to be a bad batch and killed quite a few of them.
but why pay attention to reality when the romantic myths are so much nicer?
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