THE GLOBAL CHURCH
"At the root of racism in the church is a resistance to seeing God in anything that does not resemble ourselves. The idea is that Christ is present only in European-style churches, in imagery that white Anglo Catholics recognize, in solemn Latin chants, and in liturgies designed for Europe and the United States. Arguing that any effort to make the church and the liturgy culturally relevant in another part of the world amounts to idolatry reveals an inability to claim that other groups of people are not of God and are therefore undeserving of basic dignity. It amounts to forgetting that all of humanity is a reflections of the divine." (Nancy McAuliffe, "Seeing God's Presence at a High School in Micronesia," America Magazine, (November 22, 2019)
THE AMAZON SYNOD
When Pope Francis and members of indigenous populations presided over a tree-planting ceremony to mark the opening of the Amazon Synod, some conservative Catholic commentators on EWTN, Eternal Word Television Network, denounced the event as pagan. LifeSite News made mocking references to indigenous people in face paint and feather headdresses at Mass.
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Pope Francis responded to the second remark by saying that there is little difference between having feathers on your head and the three-point peaked hat worn by certain officials in our dicasteries.
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FINAL DOCUMENT
THE AMAZON: NEW PATHS FOR THE CHURCH
AND FOR AN INTEGRAL ECOLOGY
THE AMAZON: NEW PATHS FOR THE CHURCH
AND FOR AN INTEGRAL ECOLOGY
We are all invited to approach the Amazon peoples on an equal footing, respecting their history, their cultures, their style of 'good living' (cf. Pope Francis, Opening of the Works of the Special Assembly, 7.10, 2019). Colonialism is the imposition of some people's ways of life on others, whether economically, culturally or religiously. We reject a colonial style of evangelization. Proclaiming the Good News of Jesus implies recognizing the seeds of the Word already present in cultures. The evangelization that we propose today for the Amazon is the enculturated proclamation that generates intercultural processes that promote the life of the Church with an Amazonian face and identity. (Amazon: New Paths for the Church, no. 55).