Clifton: meeting to reflect on Amazonia Synod

A meeting was held at St John's parish in Bath a few weeks ago to reflect upon the Pope's encyclical, Laudato Si', in preparation for the Synod on the Amazon to be held in Rome this October. The group looked at the lives of Chico Mendes, Sister Dorothy Stang, and Adelinho Ramos, as just three people who gave their lives in recent years to protect the forests and help those who live there care for our common home.

As well as videos, we were privileged to speak live on Skype with some important people in Brazil - Archbishop Roque Paloschi of Porto Velho, Rondonia, President of the Indigenous Missionary Council and a member of REPAM, the Pan-Amazonian Church Network, and our own Fr Leo Dolan, late of St Alphege's, Bath, a Clifton Diocesan priest now working in Rondonia. Our contact in St John's Bath with the poor in Brazil goes back some 50 years.

Archbishop Roque appeared with an anthropologist and a leader of the indigenous people. They told us about the difficulties they face from illegal loggers, miners and big landowners. Our attention was drawn to a statement from the Catholic Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI). CIMI repudiates measures published on the first day of President Jair Bolsonaro's administration that seek to develop the country, overriding individual and collective rights of traditional communities and peoples, attack leaders who fight for rights, threaten and criminalise defenders of the environment and civil society organisations.

The National Indian Foundation FUNAI has been weakened. It no longer has a brief carry out studies on the identification and protection of areas designated for indigenous. The Government transferred to the Ministry of Agriculture, ruled by farmers who oppose the rights of the peoples, the assignment to carry out the studies of identification, delimitation, demarcation and registration of areas required by indigenous peoples. In short, the government decreed, in its first act in power, the annihilation of the rights guaranteed in Articles 231 and 232 of Brazil's Federal Constitution, a letter of the law of the country.

The Missionary Indian Council is publicly repudiating such measures and denouncing them as part of a collusion between powerful landowners, mining and logging entrepreneurs to loot indigenous lands.

The Bath group made a commitment to continue linking with fellow Christians in the Amazon rainforest.

The Synod on the Amazon will be held in Rome 6- 27 October 2019.