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Saving the Amazon: A Special Feature
September 19, 2019
Amazon Synod
MANAUS, Brazil -- On the third finger of his left hand Oblate Fr. Robert Valicourt wears a black, wooden ring made from the pit of a tacumã palm tree, a plant native to the Amazon.
Such rings are common among Catholic missionaries living and working in northern Brazil, as Valicourt has for the majority of his adult life. The rings symbolize a missionary’s bond with the Indigenous people of the Amazon. It is a commitment to life and to the land that sustains life.
Tacumã rings were used in the 19th century as wedding rings among escaped slaves hiding in the forest from bounty hunters. Though gold miners have been coming to the Amazon for generations, the Indigenous people never could afford gold rings. Among the poor and the native people, tacumã rings became a badge of honour for those prepared to sacrifice their lives to protect their communities and their way of life.
These people and others like them from almost 400 Indigenous groups scattered across the Amazon river basin are who Pope Francis had in mind when he summoned bishops from around the world to attend his Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region, to be held Oct. 6-27 in Rome.
“The Church is called to accompany and share the pain of the Amazonian people and to collaborate in healing their wounds,” the Pope wrote in a 45-page preparatory document for the synod. For three weeks, more than 100 bishops from the Amazon region and representatives of the continental episcopal conferences will pray and deliberate on the Church’s mission to a vast region — predominantly Brazilian but connecting nine nations — which faces unrelenting threats to its ecology and people.
The bishops will focus on the Amazon but by examining the impact of exploitive human activity in the rainforest they will be drafting a template for how the Church should respond in the modern world whenever it confronts challenges related to ecology, evangelization and injustice — whenever it reaches out to the exploited, the oppressed, the poor.
The Pope’s thesis is that the Amazon — source of 20 per cent of the world’s oxygen, 15 per cent of its fresh water, the hiding place of thousands upon thousands of still undiscovered flora and fauna and home to between 110 and 130 different languages — has much to teach us about the world. It’s not a separate, distant reality. It’s the canary in a vast, global coal mine. It is also a flash point, a wound in the flesh of the planet which may yet lead us to grace.
“The Church is called to accompany and share the pain of the Amazonian people and to collaborate in healing their wounds.”
Canada will be represented at the Synod by Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Vatican’s Prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, and Fr. Michael Czerny, an under-secretary in the Vatican’s office for refugees and migrants who will be made a cardinal the day before the Synod opens. Several themes likely to emerge at the synod are familiar in Canada, including reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples whose language, culture and livelihoods have been increasingly threatened by settlers and the agriculture, mining, ranching and forestry industries that push them from ancestral lands. Canadians know these stories of disappearing languages and cultures of Indigenous people and confrontations over land rights.
There are two other significant Canadian parallels. Climate change and the ecological threat to the environment posed by Amazonian deforestation is acutely similar to threats Canada’s environment faces as Arctic ice disappears. The Amazon and Canada’s north are also alike in that each presents huge challenges in bringing the sacraments and spreading the Gospel to people scattered across huge, largely inhospitable regions. Synod discussions about giving a greater role to women and potentially controversial deliberations on the possibility of ordinary married men to serve in remote areas will be followed closely in Canada.
The Amazon and the challenges it faces are symbolized by Valicourt’s black tacumã ring. The ring encompasses the life he has led among the people he cares about,
the people who have cared for him, the people who live in little villages that hug the rivers or surround the terminus of a dirt road that may or may not be plotted on a map somewhere, the people whose future is so uncertain.
Well past 80, Valicourt is in his element with the young, Portuguese-speaking lay missionaries who work the missions. He loves these young people who are carrying on his life’s work. He is wedded to them and the people they serve with that smooth, hard, black ring.
But Valicourt’s ring is also a challenge to us. He will wear that ring when they lower him into his grave somewhere in the Amazon. The upcoming synod will ask, “Where do we stand?” Does Valicourt’s ring, his commitment, matter to us? Does it matter to the Church?
The position of Pope Francis, and the direction he is leading the Church, is clear. The Church’s first Latin American pope embraces Valicourt’s commitment. In calling this synod, Francis has declared that he wants a Church that will help reverse the world from a path of “self destruction” and stand by the Amazon and its people.
“The Church is not alien to your problems and your lives,” Pope Francis told Indigenous people gathered in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, in January of 2018. He was there to lay out his argument for calling a synod to specifically address the crisis in the Amazon. “She does not want to be aloof from your way of life and organization. We need the native peoples to shape the culture of the local churches in Amazonia.”
All humans share a common destiny with the Amazon. That truth is embedded in planetary ecology. Strip out enough trees, cut down enough forest for more cattle ranches, gold mines and soy farms, and scientists tell us the Amazon will stop generating its own rain. Without rain generated by transpiration (when leaves release moisture into the atmosphere), the entire Amazon basin ecosystem will collapse and the planet’s greatest rainforest will become desert, no longer an important source of oxygen for the planet.
In 2007 scientists estimated the tipping point will occur when 40 per cent of the Amazon forest is gone. Last year, scientists at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and George Mason University in Virginia revised that scientific tipping point to somewhere between 20 and 25 per cent.
Scientists believe that in the past half century about 17 per cent of the Amazon rainforest has been lost, and the pace of deforestation is accelerating. In the first seven months of this year alone, the Amazon lost roughly 4,300 square kilometres of forest (an area about eight times the size of Toronto),
mainly to ranchers, farmers and loggers. Since August, the rate of deforestation has increased due to more than 40,000 Amazon wildfires, burning mainly in Brazil and Bolivia.
When the Amazon wildfires story swept headlines the Pope prayed for the “forest-lung” of the planet. For him, the crisis in the Amazon is no local tragedy. It is global.
Jesuit lawyer Fr. Vanildo Pereira also wears a tacumã ring. He finds nothing novel or radical in what Pope Francis says. More than 50 years ago, during the Second Vatican Council, the Church’s landmark document on social teaching, Gaudium et Spes, declared its solidarity with those who are poor and afflicted “in any way.”
“It’s a fundamental statement,” said Pereira. And it is a statement now being tested by the Church’s response to the plight of the Indigenous people of Amazonia.
Pereira’s very existence — as a lawyer and priest who is one with the people and the cultures a material world has pushed to the brink — illustrates the Church’s approach to the Amazon. The Church wants to save trees and rivers and wildlife because this vast biosphere, this natural world, is intrinsic to the lives of human beings made in the image of God.
In a recent interview, Pope Francis explained why he called a synod on the Amazon.
“[The Amazon] is the ‘child’ of Laudato Si’...”
“It is the ‘child’ of Laudato Si’,” he said, referring to his groundbreaking 2015 encyclical on the environment. “Those who have not read it will never understand the synod on the Amazon. Laudato Si’ is not a green encyclical, it is a social encyclical, which is based on a green reality, the safeguarding of creation.”
The pace at which people around the world, not just in the Amazon, are exploiting the planet’s resources has created “a global emergency,” the Pope said. There is an ecological crisis existing beside a human crisis. The synod will examine both, and highlight how religious, political and business leaders must work together to become champions of the planet’s ecosystems and defenders of the dignity and rights of affected populations, particularly those who are poor, exploited and displaced.
As the torch passes from Valicourt’s generation, Pereira has become the guardian of the bond between Valicourt and the Amazon. The Yanomami people call him a “warrior with a pen,” because the Yanomami language doesn’t have a word for lawyer.
“The law is a tool for developing and defending people’s rights,” Pereira explained. “When people start to suffer, when some of them start to die, they want recourse to people who know the law.”
But the law can also be their enemy. For 15 years the mining industry and agricultural interests have backed a constitutional amendment in Brazil known as PEC 215. This change would put decisions about Indigenous lands solely in the hands of Brazil’s congress — a congress beholden to agribusiness and big landowners and dominated by politicians who believe God wants them to separate the Indians from their land and their way of life.
“The Indian has always been seen as an impediment,” Pereira said. “It’s a new idea that you can’t exploit the Indigenous.”
If the Amazon collapses and the climate veers out of control, then everything goes — economies, governments, communities, civilization as we know it.
The synod will challenge us to ask, “Where do we stand?” Would we rather wear rings of gold or tacumã?