What happened?
Divisions are growing over next month’s Amazon synod, with one cardinal warning of “a situation never before seen in the Church’s history”, and a prominent bishop describing the Amazon’s ecological crisis as “a true apocalypse”.
The synod’s theme is “new paths for the Church and for integral ecology”. In last week’s email interview with the Guardian, Bishop Erwin Kräutler said that he expected the synod to strongly denounce the exploitation of the rainforest.
What churchmen said
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller wrote to fellow cardinals saying that the synod’s instrumentum laboris (working document) included points which seemed contrary to “the authentic teaching of the Church”. It represented, he said, a “pantheistic idolatry of nature” which folds Catholicism into cults around “Mother Earth” – a phrase used several times in the document. Cardinal Raymond Burke echoed these remarks, saying that the instrumentum laboris contradicted Church teaching in ways that “portend an apostasy from the Catholic faith”.
