By CHRISTOPHER MANION
The “Amazon Synod” has finally ended. For three weeks a raft of advocacy, pageantry, heterodoxy, even idolatry, paraded through the Holy City’s streets and churches. While the synod was described as an opportunity to reflect on the Church’s mission to the region’s indigenous peoples, its stage managers quickly shifted to their desired narrative: women deacons, married priests, and the diluting of the Church’s teaching in order to accommodate the pagan religions of the region, as well as the worship of their gods and goddesses.
To put it bluntly, the synod’s cast of characters was stacked with theological and political leftists, steeped in the language of Liberation Theology. Many participants weren’t interested in theology at all. Consider: Former United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki Moon and Jeffrey Sachs were both invited by the synod’s organizers. The “theology” label just gave them cover for their agenda of worldwide abortion and population control.
One might say that the gathering served as a Rorschach test. It was quite vivid: Nuns calmly explaining how they hear “confessions”; a missionary bishop bragging that he hadn’t baptized one indigenous person in fifty years; a group of synod bishops declaring in the catacombs their devotion to Mother Earth and the fight against global warming; the bishops’ promise to “walk ecumenically with other Christian communities in the inculturation and liberating proclamation of the gospel with other religions.”
On hearing this palaver, some cheer, while others tremble in horror and fear of divine retribution.
The battle lines were more clearly defined by a grievous desecration, involving the graven images of Pachamama that were worshipped in the Vatican Gardens while Pope Francis and other senior prelates looked on. The ultimate scandal was the procession of pagan symbols into St. Peter’s itself.
Who Is Pachamama?
“Mother Earth is a goddess, venerated by indigenous peoples,” writes Sr. Edia López on the website of the Sisters of Mercy. “Mother Earth is much more than the soil we walk on. It is the wind, the fire, the water, the element that we breathe and that sustains life and prosperity. Unfortunately, we’re not doing much to protect her. The Pachamama, the Incan fertility goddess who presides over planting and harvesting, and embodies the mountains and causes earthquakes, is suffering.”
“Climate change brings destruction to the Pachamama,” Sr. Edia continues, firmly binding idolatrous worship to the ongoing struggle against Global Warming that Western hierarchies have supported for several years.
The images revered by those gathered in the Vatican Gardens depicted three very naked, very pregnant women. They were then displayed for adoration in Rome’s church of Santa Maria in Traspontina. Valiant Catholics (Austrian Alexander Tschugguel and companion) removed them from the church and threw them into the River Tiber.
The response from supporters of the depontification (our term, created to describe the throwing of pagan idols from a bridge) was so great the Tschugguel has founded the St. Boniface Institute in Vienna. In his words, the new institute will “give Catholic laity the possibility to speak out. No to paganism in the Church! No to the globalist agenda in the Church! No to the ongoing destruction from within! From the heart of Europe, we want to fight for the restoration of our wonderful Catholic culture and traditions, for a Church that follows our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!”
While some exulted at the idols’ fate, others in Rome were horrified. Pope Francis, who had attended the pagan service held in the Vatican Gardens, apologized to those whom the dunking might have offended. On the other hand, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler responded by citing Phil. 2:11 to state clearly the proper relationship of the Earth to the divine: “So that at Jesus’ name every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth, & under the earth, & every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: JESUS CHRIST IS LORD,” he tweeted.
Fr. Linus Clovis, spiritual director of the Population Research Institute, recalled that, on the sixtieth anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun, “Pope Paul VI delivered a tocsin that seemed at the time somewhat melodramatic. On October 13, 1977, the Pope declared that ‘The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world. The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church’.”
Fr. Clovis joined countless others in recommending prayers and masses of reparation as the proper response to the Pachamama scandal.
So what comes next? On the one hand, the Amazon Synod muddied the waters of doctrine and practice, engendering fears that the hierarchical left will use the occasion to remove celibacy in the Latin Church, while permitting the ordination of women. That’s certainly a fundamental goal of the radical left.
But the synod also exposed for all to see the revolutionary agenda of that powerful faction. Since the election of Pope Francis six years ago, the hints of these irruptions have occurred so often that some have expected the Pope to canonize “St. Ambiguous.” But now the fog factor has been reduced as the leftist faction in the Vatican, more confident of its power than ever before, is making public its move to make sure that its revolution is irreversible.
Ideology And Annihilation
The Pachamama Synod contributes a new arrow in the ideological quiver of the Marxist Left in the Church. We’ve already been told that “racism” is a subtle, structural sin of which “most” whites are guilty by their very membership in an antirevolutionary class. This teaching of the USCCB’s 1979 pastoral, Brothers and Sisters to Us, constitutes a classic contribution to the “Spirit of Vatican II,” which interprets history in terms of the class struggle, rather than individual freedom.
A Social Justice Warrior who cheers the Pachamama Melee spelled out the synod’s message for Crux Online. “Whether we live in the Amazon or the United States of America,” he said, “we all are consuming too much. It’s a tough message and it may be the closest the Catholic Church has ever gotten to the concept of social sin, that as an entire society — our level of consumption is sinful. Our level of consumption is hurting our planet, depriving the poor and disconnecting us from one another. While this is a regional document, it gets pretty specific on the idea of ecological sin. The document not only encourages us to check our addiction on fossil fuels, but even specifically challenges us to consume less meat.”
Before you laugh, consider what is going on here: Until now, the U.S. hierarchy has taught that “most” whites are guilty of a “subtle” social sin — racism — and no one else can be. Not anymore. Now, with the synod’s introduction of a “social sin” committed by “an entire society,” we see the logical goal of Liberation Theology. Pope Francis has never hidden his hatred of capitalism and of the West in general. Now it is consumption itself that damns the modern soul and the society to which it belongs.
“Logical”? Yes, the Marxist dialectic has a “logic” of its own: hatred of the past (and its consequences in the present) require the destruction not only of a particular class, but of the entire “sinful structure” of society itself. Here we see what Gerhart Niemeyer calls the “Total Critique.” At the heart of Marxism. The final stage of the class struggle requires the complete annihilation of the existing order, in order to establish a “just” society which will no longer “consume too much.”
They won’t be happy until we’re all Venezuela.
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