Irish missionary voices to be heard in Church Amazon summit

Two Irish clerics have been asked to take part in the Vatican’s upcoming Synod of Bishops on the Amazon.

A Kiltegan Father originally from Monkstown, Co. Dublin, Bishop Derek Byrne of Primavera do Leste-Paranatinga in Brazil will join Fr Peter Hughes, a Galway-born and Columban Father who works for CELAM, the Latin American episcopal conference, at the gathering in Rome next month.

Now based in Peru, Fr Hughes has been a key player in setting up the synod.

The October 6-27 assembly will be focused on the needs of the millions of people living in and near the world’s largest rainforest, and comes after 18 months of preparations, entailing consultations with hundreds of communities in nine South American countries. The synod’s formal title is ‘The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and For Integral Ecology’.

While the core focus of the conference will be the needs of those residents of the Amazon region whose lives are threatened by environmental destruction on a hitherto unknown scale, the synod will consider such diverse issues as illegal deforestation, exploitative mining practices, rapid urbanisation’s challenges to the family.

Challenges

The synod will also consider the challenges the Church in the region faces in being more prophetic, exploring the possibility of ordaining married men to the priesthood in situations of extreme need, with its working document or instrumentum laboris calling for the Church to identify what type of official ministry might be conferred on women.

Such issues have made the synod, the fourth of Francis’ papacy, controversial for some, with its working document having been openly criticised by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, formerly head of the Church’s doctrinal watchdog the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and by Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, erstwhile head of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences.

Cardinal Raymond Burke has announced that he will be undertaking a 40-day “crusade of prayer and fasting” in hopes that the synod’s working document, which he says contains theological errors and heresies, will not receive synodal approval.

Synod

Bishop Byrne and Fr Hughes will be among 185 voting members at the synod, almost all of whom will come from nine South American countries, with these being supplemented by 80 non-voting lay experts and auditors, including 33 women.