Catholic Church scrambles aboard the woke train with ‘ecological sins,’ Amazonian virtue-signaling

The Catholic Church is urging its members to recognize “ecological sins” and is trying to reinvent itself as “a church with an Amazonian and indigenous face,” with a set of woker-than-thou proposals that have enraged Catholics.

Church authorities called for an “ecological conversion” that would open Catholics’ eyes to “the gravity of sins against the environment as sins against God, against our neighbor, and against future generations” at a synod in Rome focused on the Amazon region, Vatican News reported on Wednesday. 

The conference’s agenda has been slammed for turning the Church into a “secular NGO with an ecological-social-psychological mandate” by some Catholics, including Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, who views it as a Trojan horse for political meddling.

The synod’s working document admits that Catholic missionaries took part in the colonization of the Amazon region, but attempts to expiate the Church’s guilt for atrocities committed by the early colonizers by aligning itself with the remaining indigenous people – centuries after the fact – against their government. It bemoans “climate change and the increase in human intervention” for “driving the Amazon towards a point of no return.”

“Today the Church … has the historic opportunity to differentiate itself from the new colonizing powers by listening to the Amazon peoples,” the document proclaims, decrying the “violation of the rights of indigenous peoples” and proclaiming solidarity with “the peoples of the Amazon, especially the poor and the culturally different.” Those “isolated peoples” with no contact with civilization – or Catholicism – are especially singled out for the Church’s protection.

The Church may decry colonialist predators, but it’s not acting all that different from a colonizer itself, openly discussing the “challenge” of “how to recover the Amazon territory, rescue it from neocolonial degradation and restore its authentic and healthy well-being.” Brazil, which contains most of the Amazon, is a heavily Catholic nation led by a president determined to open the rainforest up to farmers, miners, and any other industries that can turn a tidy profit. The Church appears determined to override that government’s authority in the name of saving the planet (and a few souls in the bargain). Swathing itself in moral righteousness, it pledges to “demand the protection of the areas” where its helpless new charges live and “plan joint pastoral action in border regions,” where it will push governments to “respond to the needs and rights of migrants.”

It’s easy for the Church to slam “the idolatry of money” – the Vatican has more money than many countries. It’s not so easy for a Brazilian logger to give up his livelihood for the sake of sustainability. Though perhaps the Church would like to see him become a priest?

As if shoehorning climate change into Catholic doctrine wasn’t controversial enough for one synod, the conference is also mulling doing away with the celibacy requirement for the priesthood – complaining that some 70 percent of those living in the Amazon region are unable to take part in Catholic ritual because there aren’t enough priests. 

The Catholic Church has a long and honorable history of helping the poor, and many of its motives may be noble. But it also has a long and less-than-honorable history of political meddling. Elevating environmentalism to the level of religious doctrine is an example of the latter. As Catholics fear the Amazon synod is "formalizing heresy," governments should be wary of science that has to be taken on faith.

By Helen Buyniski, RT

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