In the year of the Amazon Synod, we wish to recover the memory and testimonial of Florentino Zabalza, Augustinian Recollect and Bishop of the Prelature of Lábrea (Amazon, Brazil) from 1971 to 1994, who left his memoirs that are now offered to all audiences, for the first time, through AgustinosRecoletos.org.
2019 will be one of the most important years for the Catholic Church in the Amazon, with repercussions that we can easily qualify, without exaggeration, as historic in nature. For the first time, a Pope, Francis, convened a special Synod over this natural, social and ecclesial space with such peculiar characteristics.
The Synod would take place from October 6 to 27 of 2019 in Rome with the participation of around 250 Bishops. But this meeting at the Vatican would be the culmination of a whole series of activities, meetings, studies, conferences, publications, visits and proposals born in the capillary structure of the Amazonia Church: base communities, charismatic groups, pastoral teams, parishes, prelatures and diocese, supradiocesan regional institutions, bishop conferences, non-governmental associations, congregations and religious orders, centers of formation for leaders and pastoral agents…
The Church in general and in particular, a countless number of persons, communities and institutions have spent months talking in depth about the Amazon reality, its peoples, the role of the Church in that society, development policies, human conflicts, the ecology… because all of that has to do with the Gospel and with the Evangelization.
Since October 15, 2017, when the Pope during the Angelus for the first time spoke about a Special Synod fpr the Amazon, in his meeting with the indigenous people at Puerto Maldonado (Perú, January 19, 2018), the synodal process had already produced a lot of literature and many preparatory meetings.
The steps that created a propitious environment for the convocation of the Synod had been taken before; therefore, since the beginning of this decade Claudio Cardinal Hummes has visited many dioceses, prelatures and Amazonian communities as the papal representative, among them the Prelature of Lábrea in October of 2014.
In the same year 2014, REPAM (Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network) was created, and Hummes presides over it since 2015. His statements upon taking office already hinted that the path of reflection and action of the church in the Amazon were serious:
“REPAM represents a new incentive and relaunch of the Church’s work in the Amazon, so strongly desired by the Holy Father. There, the Church desires to be, with courage and determination, a missionary, merciful, prophetic Church and close to all people, especially the poorest, the most excluded, discarded, forgotten and wounded. A Church with an Amazonian face and a native clergy, as Pope Francis proposed in his address to the bishops of Brazil”.
From March 7 to 9 of this year, 2019, the Archdiocese of Manaus has hosted a seminar on the Synod, the last great meeting at the highest preparatory level for the Synod.
“Amazonia: new paths for the Church and for an integral ecology” is the general theme of the Synod, which has a methodology widely used by Catholic pastoral care for decades: see the cry of the Amazonian peoples; discern the Amazonian reality from the Gospel; and act to achieve a true Church with an “Amazonian face”.
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