Th e Amazon Synod and immigration

THE AMAZON SYNOD AND IMMIGRATION

The following talk was delivered at the Roman Forum Summer Symposium, in Gardone Riviera, Italy, on 12 July 2019. It is published here with the kind permission of the Director of the Symposium, Dr John Rao. For twenty-seven years the Roman Forum has been a beacon of light for authentic Catholic faith and culture, each year bringing together some of the most insightful Catholic thinkers of our time. This talk by Prof. Roberto de Mattei along with other presentations of the Symposium will soon be published in a book.

Iwould like to attempt to link two events seemingly unalike: the Synod on the Amazon to be held in the Vatican in October and the landings of immigrants in Lampedusa.

The liaison between these two events is Pope Francis. Pope Francis is the one who has called the Synod on the Amazon and Pope Francis is also the one who defends most insistently the rights of immigrants and proposes himself in Italy as an anti-Salvini.

What do the two matters have in common? The Synod on the Amazon and the migratory invasion are both part of the same world vision, of which these two issues are the expression. This vision of the world is that of Pope Francis.

The Synod on the Amazon will lead to a “rupture” in the Catholic Church: “nothing will be as it was before”. These words were spoken on 2 May 2019 by German Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck, in charge of Adveniat, an organisation which provides Catholic relief for Latin America.

This is a clear confirmation that the revolution which is being prepared is linked to the Instrumentum laboris, the draft of the document which will be the focus of the work of the bishops who gather for the Synod in the Vatican from 6-27 October, 2019. No document like this “instrument of work” expresses the “new paradigm” of Pope Francis so clearly, bringing to light many of the theses which were already implicit in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si. The Amazon is not only a physical place, but “a reality full of life and wisdom” (no. 5), which rises to the level of a conceptual paradigm and calls us to a “pastoral, ecological and synodal” conversion (no. 5).

Also Lampedusa, like the Amazon is not only a physical PROF. ROBERTO DE MATTEI place, it is a conceptual paradigm, since the historical trip Pope Bergoglio made in October 2013. During this trip to Lampedusa, Francis launched a message which, in fact, sounded like an order to pull down the frontiers in Italy and Europe and an implicit invitation for thousands of Africans to leave their countries.

This project, this dream hails from the distant past, as I described in my book from the nineties, 19002000 Two dreams follow one another: the construction, the destruction (Fiducia, Rome 1990).

One hundred years ago, the twentieth century opened up in a climate of euphoric confidence in the myths of “science, reason and progress” and in the belief that humanity’s golden age was just about to start. It is the naive choreography of the “Excelsior” dance, which exalts modern civilisation, describing the struggle of two opposing principles, obscurantism and progress.

The philosophy of Hegelian history, the Darwinian evolutionism, the positivism of Comte, the “scientific socialism” of Marx and Engels all merge in a great ideological framework, according to which, after centuries of barbarism, humanity, enlightened by the “light of science and reason”, finally reaches the fullness of its maturity.

A great dream, a great illusion rises to the horizon: the “construction” of modern civilisation, that is, the fulfilment of that revolutionary process that in 1789 had raised Europe from the darkness of ignorance. The 1917 Communist revolution appears as a histor-

ical event bound to bring this process to implementation, negotiating the transition from the “kingdom of necessity” to the “kingdom of freedom”.

It is the era of “construction”: the city represents the great mirage of the century and the social model for building great nations, great states and a single great universal republic. The process for the unifi cation of the human race seems close. The “civilisation of work”, embodied by the large iron and steel plants and smoking chimneys, will be able to defeat poverty and will spread wealth and well-being for every social class. Marxism was judged to be the best ever tool to make this dream come true.

Even those who criticised it were convinced that the society’s transformation process, driven by communism was irreversible. The main reason why the Second Vatican Council did not condemn communism and instead started, with Ostpolitik, a policy of collaboration with it, was the conviction of the irreversibility of socialism and Marxism.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall was not only the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe: it was the failure of modernity, the failure of modern civilisation that was supposed to be built in contrast to Christian civilisation, in the name of the

The architects of this dream are the same as those of construction: the heirs of all the Revolutions, which after centuries of utopias and failures, attempt a fi nal metamorphosis in chaos, the passage of humanity from the new world order to tribalism.

Post-modernity is this: not a “construction” plan, as it had been for the pseudo-civilisation conceived by humanism and the Enlightenment, which afterwards resulted in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, but a new and diff erent utopia - the deconstruction and tribalisation of Europe.

The rejection of modernity takes on the face of tribalism, of a cult of nature that is embodied in the emblematic fi gure of the savage.

The dream of building the “novus ordo saeculorum”, emerging at the beginning of the 20th century, was replaced by an opposing dream, that of destruction: the “kingdom of chaos”. The “new world order” is in reality worldwide chaos, which today has the colours of the Amazonia, the happy communist paradise in which indigenous peoples pass on the wisdom of the cult of nature.

From this viewpoint, we can understand the words of one of the “prophets of chaos”, such as Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, who considered immigration “a

“ Th e main reason why the Second Vatican Council did not condemn communism and instead started, with Ostpolitik, a policy of collaboration with it, was the conviction of the irreversibility of socialism and Marxism.”

principles of the French Revolution and of socialism. Modernity has unveiled its face - a century of death and collective massacres: two hundred million victims of communism, seventy million victims in two world wars, an even greater number of victims of legalised abortion, widespread on a global scale. The century of great totalitarian buildings and of great political myths has failed. The dream of building modernity is gone.

The creators of thr Revolution, whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the Church and of Christian civilisation, have replaced the “dream of construction” that opened the twentieth century, with a “dream of destruction and chaos” that has opened up the century in which we now live. prophetic choice” necessary: in order to understand that “the migratory process in act from the increasingly poor south towards the increasingly rich north is a great ethical and civil opportunity for renewal, to reverse the course of decadent consumerism in act in western Europe.”

From this perspective of “creative destruction”, I made the comment:

“It would not be the immigrants that needed to integrate into European civilisation, but the contrary; Europe would need to ‘dis-integrate’ and regenerate thanks to the ethnic groups which occupy it [...]. It is the dream of creative disorder, of a shake-up similar to the one which gave new life to the west at the time

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of the Barbarian Invasions to generate the poly-cultural society of the future.” (Rorate Coeli, 30 May 2019) I wrote:

“The flows of populations are not only an ethnic transplanting, but a toppling of civilisation, a ‘counter-colonisation’, in which migrants are seen as bringers of a hybrid civilisation or mixed race, opposed to the Christian one which built Europe. The destruction of the national states passes thereby through a policy of replacement, whether it be ethnic or cultural. The cultural replacement consists in the negation of any identity rooted in European Christian tradition; the ethnic replacement occurs with the entry of a human mass of immigrants that substitute the European population, decimated by abortion and contraception. The anti-birth mentality is the biological expression of the cultural and moral suicide of the West.” (Rorate Cæli, 30 May 2019)

In an interview with Eugenio Scalfari in La Repubblica, 11 November 2016, Pope Bergoglio endorses the concept of “mixed race”, suggested by Scalfari. And Scalfari, in an editorial from the same newspaper of 17 September 2017, affirms that, according to Pope Francis: “In the global society we live in, entire populations are moving to this and that country, and little by little, as time passes, an increasingly integrated sort of ‘mixed race’ will be created. He thinks this is a positive thing, where individuals and families and communities become more and more integrated, the various ethnicities will gradually disappear and a great part of our earth will be inhabited by a population with new spiritual and physical connotations. We will need centuries or even thousands of years for a phenomenon of this kind to happen, but according to the words of the Pope – the tendency is this. It is not without reason he preaches the One God, namely, the One for all people. I am not a believer, but I recognise a logic in Pope Francis’s words: one people and one God. There has never been until now a religious leader who has preached this – his [own] truth to the world.”

The term “mixed race” occurs frequently in Pope Francis’s ministry. On 14 February, 2019, in his intervention at the event of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (FAD) in Rome, Francis met representatives of indigenous populations and, in defining these communities as “a living cry of hope”, he expressed his hope for a “cultural hybridisation”

“Post-modernity is this: not a ‘construction’ plan, as it had been for the pseudo-civilisation conceived by humanism and the Enlightenment, which afterwards resulted in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, but a new and diff erent utopia - the deconstruction and tribalisation of Europe.”

among the “so-called civilised populations” and native populations, who “know how to listen to the earth, see the earth and touch the earth”. “Cultural hybridisation”, he explained is the route to follow, by working “to safeguard those who live in the poorest, rural zones of the planet, but richer in wisdom in their coexistence with nature.”

On 19 January 2018, at Puerto Maldonado, in the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, Pope Francis while meeting the natives, had said to them: “The treasure that encloses this region” cannot be grasped or understood, without “your wisdom” and “your knowledge”.

The “new paradigm of integral ecology” (no. 56) proposed by the Instrumentum laboris, fi nds its metaphysical foundation in the indigenous theology of Latin America, a “postmodern” development of liberation theology which was condemned by Pope John Paul II in 1985. In order to understand better his reference to the “wisdom” and “knowledge” of the natives, we need to turn to the work of an author dear to Pope Francis: Leonardo Boff , the theologian who has been most coherent in developing liberation theology into indigenous “eco-theology”. Boff , who was born in 1938, became a Franciscan in 1959 after he had joined the most radical wing of liberation theology. He then abandoned his Franciscan habit and the priesthood in order to go and live with the Marxist activist Marcia Maria Monteiro de Miranda. In 2015 he boasted of having helped Pope Francis write Laudato si.

The Instrumentum laboris again takes up, in many passages, Boff ’s slogan that is also the title of one of his books: The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor (Cittadella, Rome 1996). The document affi rms that the Church listens to the “cry, of both the people and the earth” (no.18), because in the Amazon “the land is a theological place by which the faith is lived. It is also a unique source of God’s revelation” (no.19).1For Boff , “we need to move from the modern paradigm to the post-modern, global ‘holistic’ paradigm that off ers ‘a new dialogue with the universe’ and a new form of dialogue with the totality of beings and their relationships.”2

The point of departure of his postmodern, tribalist thinking is the failure of Soviet communism, incapable of realising the Marxist utopia of a society without classes. The only people who historically achieved integral communism are the indigenous peoples of Latin America, who are particularly dense in the Amazon, a territory of about seven million square kilometers, 65% of which is in Brazil, with the remainder divided between eight other South American countries.

The communism of the indigenous peoples is expressed in a conception of the cosmos which includes a conception of society. The indigenist sociology is the consequence of a cosmology according to which there is no diff erence between people, animals, and plants, but all beings, both living and inanimate, are “citizens of the universe” and bear the same rights. “The new socio-ecological democracy does not only include human beings, but all beings who inhabit the cosmos: it is a “cosmocracy”,3 a new “socio-cosmic pact”.4 “The diff erence between living beings and ‘inert’ beings is in the degree of thickening of relationships.”5

In place of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights, there is to be a declaration of the rights of the earth.6 The earth is to be considered as a unity, comprising its physical-chemical structure and the living beings who dwell there. It is understood as “an organic macro-system, a living super-organism”7 and ought to be considered as “the great and generous Pacha Mama (great mother) of the Andean culture, or as a living superorganism, the Gaia of Greek mythology and modern cosmology.”8 “There is no diff erence between earth and humanity. They form an organic and systemic whole.”9

This cosmovision denies the value of any reality, placing them all in interconnection with each other. “All beings live in a story of relationships. Outside of relationship nothing exists,” Boff affi rms.10 In his philosophical-religious vision, “the universe is made

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up of an immense story of relationships in such a way that each exists and lives by means of the other, for the other, and with the other; the human being is a node of relations facing in all directions; Divinity itself is revealed as a pan-relational Reality.”11

As for Boff, so also for the Instrumentum laboris: everything is interconnected. The Amazon is the land where “everything is connected” (no. 20); everything is “constitutively related, forming a vital whole” (no. 21). The Church must heed “the Amazon peoples” (no. 7), because these people are able to live in “intercommunication” with the entire cosmos (no. 12). But if everything is relationship and nothing exists outside of itself, the secret of reality is nothingness, because relationship has meaning only as a function of the reality which it connects: relationship cannot connect what does not exist. The pendulum of indigenous cosmology swings between an absolute nihilism and an equally absolute pantheism.

Leonardo Boff seeks to defend himself from the accusation of pantheism, defining himself as “panentheist”. Panentheism (from the Greek πᾶν “everything”, ἐν “in”, θεός “God”) is the theological position which maintains that God is immanent in the universe but at the same time transcends it. The word was first proposed by Karl Christian Frederick Krause (1781-1832), a student of Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel. Panentheism denies the existence of a God who creates the universe ex nihilo as something distinct from him, instead proposing a creation that is continual and “processual”.

God is the “self-conscience” of the universe, the universe which as it evolves becomes aware of its own evolution. He [God] “emerges from the global process of the world in evolution and expansion”;12 “he is immanent in the world, participates in its open process, there he reveals himself and enriches himself.”13 Boff refers to Teilhard de Chardin who “saw in the omega point the great force of attraction which calls the universe to reach its supreme height in the theosphere.”14 Boff explains: “We are not talking about placing God and the world each facing each other, as was classically done, but rather of placing God within the process of the world and considering the world within the process of God.”15 “Nature is the result of a long cosmic process. It is cosmogenesis.”16According to Boff, the majority of the peoples of South America were predominantly panentheist, as were the ancient cultures of southeast Asia:

“The universe in cosmogenesis invites us to live the experience that underlies panentheism: in every slightest manifestation of being, in every movement, in every expression of life, of intelligence and of love, we find ourselves dealing with the mystery of the universe in progress (cosmogenetic process).”17

The religious model closest to the ecotheology of liberation, according to Boff, is pagan polytheism, “with its rich pantheon of divinities populating all of the spaces of nature.”18 Boff accuses Christianity of having “slipped, for reasons that are not always identifiable, into a sorrowful separation between God and nature”, thus depriving nature of its “magic” and “sacramentality”.

“However we want to interpret it, we ought to recognise that the pagans had this extraordinary thing: they could see the presence of the gods in all things. In the woods, Pan and Sylvan, in the earth Terra Gais Demetra (Mother Earth) or Ceres, in the sun Apollo and Febo and so forth.”19

In fact, primitive man, explains Boff, lived in a “mystical union” with nature.20 He adored as divinity the rocks, the plants, the animals. Witchcraft and shamanism are expressions of this spirituality. “The shaman is one who enters into contact with the cosmic energies, he knows how to control the stream of energy within himself and even only with his pres-

ence or through gestures, dances, and rites he makes those energies benefi cial for human needs in his search for equilibrium with nature and with himself.”21

The same polytheist and pantheist spirit characterises the Instrumentum laboris, in which we read:

“The life of the Amazonian community has not yet been infl uenced by Western civilisation. This is refl ected in the beliefs and rites regarding the action of spirits and the divinity – named in many diff erent ways – with and in the territory, with and in relation to nature. This cosmo-vision is picked up in Francis’s ‘mantra’: ‘everything is connected’ (LS 16, 91, 117, 138, 240).” (no. 25)

According to the Vatican document:

“The Creator Spirit which fi lls the universe (cf. Wisdom 1:7) is the Spirit that for centuries has nurtured the spirituality of these peoples even before the proclaiming of the Gospel and spurs them onto accepting it, from the base of their [own] cultures and traditions.” (no. 120)

Hence, “we need to grasp what the Spirit of the Lord has taught these peoples over the course of the centuries: faith in God, Father-Mother-Creator; the sense of communion and harmony with the earth; the sense of solidarity with their fellow-man; the project of ‘living well’; the wisdom of a thousand-year old civilisation the elders possess and which has eff ects on the health, cohabitation, education and cultivation of the land; the relationship with nature and Mother Earth; the capacity of resistance and resilience of the women in particular; the religious rites expressed; the relations with their forbearers; their contemplative stance and sense of gratuity; the celebration and festivity and the sacred sense of the land.” (no. 121)

The Church, the Instrumentum laboris further affi rms, must divest itself of its Roman identity and adopt “an Amazonian face”.

“The Amazonian face of the Church fi nds its expression in the plurality of its peoples, cultures and ecosystems. This diversity requires an option for an outward-bound and missionary Church, incarnated in all its activities, expressions and languages.” (no. 107) “A Church with an Amazonian face in its multiple nuances, seeks to be an “outward-bound” Church (cf. EG 20-23), which leaves behind a colonial mono-cultural, clerical and domineering tradition and knows how to discern and adopt without fear, the diverse cultural expressions of the peoples.” (no. 110)

Walter Cardinal Brandmüller has affi rmed that the Instrumentum laboris “contradicts the binding teaching of the Church on decisive points and thus it ought to be qualifi ed as heretical” and, given that the document places the very fact of divine revelation up for discussion, “we ought also in addition to speak of apostasy.” The Instrumentum laboris, concludes the Cardinal, “constitutes an attack on the foundations of the faith, in a way in which was not thought possible until now. And thus it ought to be rejected with the maximum fi rmness.”22

Roberto de Mattei is a former professor of Modern History and History of Christianity in the European University of Rome. He founded, and oversees, the Lepanto Foundation that operates in Washington and in Rome. He directs the magazine Radici Cristiane and the Corrispondenza Romana News Agency.

ENDNOTES:

1. Leonardo Boff , The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. For a cosmic ecology, Citt adella, Rome 1996, p. 183. 2. Ibid., pp. 26-27. 3. Ibid., p. 234. 4. Leonardo Boff , Ethos mundial. Um consenso minimo entre os humanos, Letraviva, Brasilia 2000, p. 116. 5. Leonardo Boff , The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. For a cosmic ecology, Citt adella, Rome 1996, p. 100. 6. Leonardo Boff , Ethos mundial, pp. 89-90; with reference to La Carta de la ti erra: valores y principios para un futuro sostenible, San José, Costa Rica 1999. 7. Leonardo Boff , Ethos mundial. Um consenso minimo entre os humanos, Letraviva, Brasilia 2000, p. 25. 8. Leonardo Boff , The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. For a cosmic ecology, Citt adella, Rome 1996, p. 27. 9. Leonardo Boff , Ethos mundial. Um consenso minimo entre os humanos, Letraviva, Brasilia 2000, p. 27. 10. Leonardo Boff , The cry of the earth and the cry of the poor. For a cosmic ecology, Citt adella, Rome 1996, p. 61. 11. Ibid., p.45. 12. Ibid., p. 248. 13. Ibid., p. 259. 14. Ibid., p. 253. 15. Ibid., p. 258. 16. Ibid., p. 42. 17. Ibid., p. 269. 18. Ibid., p. 353. 19. Ibid., p.355. 20. Ibid., p. 104. 21. Ibid., p. 277. 22. htt ps://www.corrispondenzaromana.it/il-cardinale-brandmuller-accusa-di-eresia-e-apostasia-il-sinodo-vati cano- sullamazzonia/