In this episode of the John Henry Weston Show, LifeSite's own Latin American correspondent, Matthew Hoffman, joins the show to discuss the upcoming Amazon Synod, which has been in the works for almost a year and a half. In this episode, we discuss what we know about the agenda of the synod, what it means for the future of the church, and what we don't know about it.
00:07:27.700It's just elders who kind of vaguely sort of give advice to the church, that sort of thing.
00:07:34.420And in the process, they say women were excluded.
00:07:37.340So they have this ridiculous false history that denies that God has inspired the scripture.
00:07:43.600I mean, really, they're criticizing God for having written these things into the scripture because God is the author of the scripture.
00:07:48.820At least that's what we Catholics believe.
00:07:50.540So that's just an example of the kind of material that's in here.
00:07:54.740It's truly amazing to try and argue that Jesus was so circumscribed by the times that he lived in that he couldn't have chosen women apostles.
00:08:05.660He couldn't have chosen his mother, for crying out loud.
00:08:09.000The very woman, the woman, who should have been given, if anybody, if any woman was ever to be granted priesthood or anything like that, it would have been Our Lady.
00:08:19.360And yet, because Jesus was so hemmed in by the times that he lived in, he just couldn't get there.
00:08:26.000This is the same Jesus who came and told the Jews that they should eat his flesh and drink his blood when they had strictures against drinking even animal blood, let alone human blood.
00:08:36.620The same Jesus who told the Jews that they should be worshipping a triune God, that God was Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to scandalize them.
00:08:44.780And yet we think he couldn't have done women priests if he wanted to.
00:08:53.440I mean, the Christians were so countercultural that they were constantly being killed by the Roman state, persecuted, and they were willing to die terrible deaths in order to protect their faith.
00:09:05.980They refused to, for example, go and participate in the gladiatorial games.
00:09:11.680Usually they wouldn't participate in the army, not because they thought that the armed forces was wrong to have armed forces, but because of the abuses committed by the armed forces.
00:09:20.220So they were constantly resisting the society.
00:09:22.920Why would they conform cravenly to social standards regarding women?
00:09:47.820Why are they calling it an Amazon synod, and why do you consider it an abuse?
00:09:50.760Well, it's been called the Amazon synod because it is supposedly there to address the particular problems of the Amazon region.
00:10:01.340Now, we know, in fact, that it's not addressing the real problems of the Amazon region.
00:10:05.920A bishop recently, and we publicized this on my site, we did an article on it, recently, a bishop from the Amazon region, recently declared that there are all these problems that exist that are real problems in the Amazon that aren't even being addressed by this thing.
00:10:19.480For example, only 9% of the Amazon is indigenous, yet almost the whole of these preparatory documents is about the indigenous, as if this region is filled with indigenous.
00:10:32.700In fact, it's mostly Latin American, non-indigenous Latin Americans of various kinds.
00:10:41.660And there's other things they're ignoring.
00:10:43.120For example, that there's Catholicism is almost dead in the region, apparently.
00:10:46.360And now it's Pentecostalism, Protestant Pentecostalism, that's very big.
00:10:50.700These documents don't even recognize these problems.
00:10:53.680And the reason is that this is not really an attempt to address the problems, the real problems of the Amazon region.
00:10:59.320It's there to take the Amazon region as sort of an exceptional region and then use that to experiment or to justify experimenting with, for example, a married priesthood.
00:11:12.300That's something that subversives in the church have been trying to, I'm sorry to have to put it that way, but I don't think there's any other way to put it, have been trying to promote for decades in the church.
00:11:23.160And they're using it for that sort of thing.
00:11:25.480And so it will create a precedent such that the exception then can become the rule throughout the rest of the church.
00:11:33.820That seems to be clearly the agenda here.
00:11:35.620I mean, they're not even holding this meeting in the Amazon region.
00:11:37.880It's being held in Rome to talk about a region and talk about it in a way that doesn't really even address its actual problems.
00:11:44.740And that's, yeah, I think that's actually very, very interesting because, as you're saying, the faith is dying out in this region, which has already employed so many of these false theories or ways of taking the faith.
00:12:00.780This is liberation theology, and they've been using it there and promoting it there, and it's led to this drop-off in the faith.
00:12:08.860And it seems like they want to foist that same drop-off in true Catholicism on the rest of the world.
00:12:15.880Thank you for bringing that up because it's a really important point that, first of all, these theologians are not—we're not just saying that, oh, this is really their agenda, they're liberation theologians.
00:12:29.060No, they say they're liberation theologians.
00:12:31.540For example, this preparatory document towards the Amazon Synod that we publicized, that document, the authors of it expressly state that they are liberation theologians, that this is liberation theology.
00:12:44.740Now, liberation theology has become a very big thing in the church, particularly in Brazil, in Latin America in general, but particularly in Brazil, where most of the Amazon region is found.
00:12:56.760And in Brazil, the number of Catholics has been plummeting for decades.
00:13:01.260I believe only 60% or less now of Brazilians say that they're Catholic.
00:13:07.840It was well over 90% just a couple of decades ago.
00:13:10.920And that's because as the Catholic clergy has focused more and more on political issues, converting Christianity into an ideology or Catholicism into an ideology in the minds of people, and not addressing their real problems—problems with drug addiction, problems in their families, for example, with family divisions.
00:13:32.560Well, the Protestants come in, the evangelical Protestants come in, of various kinds, Pentecostals and other kinds, addressing these issues and talking about them and talking about people's spiritual struggles, not in a way that we as Catholics would totally agree, but they're addressing them.
00:13:47.500And so incredible numbers of people are leaving, and that's what's happened in the Amazon region.
00:14:02.460In fact, it's an abuse of the people, the faithful in the Amazon, to foist a program on the rest of the world, on the rest of the church, which has been destructive to the faithful in the Amazon region itself.
00:14:17.580And it's just—it's a horrible thing to excuse this—what their agenda is and sort of blame it on the, you know, the Amazon region.
00:14:27.940Oh, look, they don't have enough priests.
00:14:29.360Oh, look, women are so—in such positions of power there that you need to have women priests represented so that you can do this.
00:14:37.900And, of course, they're not going to make it women priests, per se.
00:14:40.920They're going to try for women deacons as a sort of stepping stone toward women priests.
00:14:46.580Well, yeah, they're doing two things, at least in this document that we're talking—this particular supporting document we're talking about.
00:14:53.140One is that, as you say, they want women to be deacons.
00:15:01.540There were, in the first millennium, deaconesses in the church what were called deaconesses, but they were not—it was not a sacramental grade of order.
00:15:12.960It was a wonderful support role that women provided at different times in different particular circumstances, probably to baptize people in certain cases where there was full immersion.
00:15:22.100And so a woman being baptized would be fully naked.
00:15:24.740So perhaps the deaconess would be the one to do that, that sort of thing.
00:15:30.160So that's what a deaconess was, but it was not a sacramental grade of order.
00:15:34.420So, first of all, they want women deacons, but what they make clear is that they want these women to be recognized as sacramentally deacons.
00:15:43.580And, of course, if that's the case, why couldn't they become priests?
00:15:46.960As soon as you concede that, you would be conceding that they could become priests.
00:15:50.180But the second thing that they do in the document is to try to attack the whole idea of a hierarchical priesthood, which they say incorporates this notion of an all-male priesthood.
00:16:00.200And so in attacking that, they're trying to destroy the foundation for excluding women from the priesthood, which is something that's of the divine constitution of the church, as Pope John Paul II pointed out.
00:16:11.620This is not something that the church can change.
00:16:13.560This is not something that any law can change.
00:16:17.560It's in the divine constitution of the church, that the church is patriarchal.
00:16:22.160And they are attacking the church's patriarchal structure by attacking even the notion of a hierarchical priesthood altogether.
00:16:30.400So, yeah, those are the two ways they're coming at this female priesthood.
00:16:34.080And amazingly, there's a huge push for an ecological push, almost making the faith into a pursuance of some kind of ecological kind of a faith, if you will, is being pushed big time.
00:16:51.940It was already pushed by Pope Francis in Laudato Si, much of which actually was good.
00:16:57.140But there was this also crazed element with the, you know, the lead up, if you will, with Greta Thornburg and the whole wide world.
00:17:04.280They just did a survey just the other day where they found that over 50% of young people in America believe the world's going to end in a decade because of the environmental disaster that we're living in, which, I mean, is such hogwash.
00:17:18.940But yet people are believing this, and that kind of emergency sentiment is also being foisted into the Amazon Synod and right into the heart of the church.
00:17:31.300There's this kind of sense of panic that they're trying to generate, which, by the way, I used to be a public policy analyst in Washington, D.C. many years ago in the early 90s.
00:17:44.160And the same attempts to create panic over possible global warming was going on at the time.
00:17:52.820The predictions have been false repeatedly.
00:17:55.100They're trying to scare children, and then they're alarmed at how frightened these children are.
00:18:00.860And as you say, it's a very questionable application of natural science.
00:18:08.440But there's another issue that's involved with this, and that is that this sort of ecological theology, this eco-theology that they're pushing, is actually contrary to our faith because they are treating, in these documents, they're treating man as if he is a component of nature.
00:18:28.400He's merely a cog in the machine of nature.
00:18:30.760So man sort of exists in a certain way to serve nature, and the greater entity of which we are a part is more important than us, more important than we are.
00:18:41.880But in reality, the Christian faith teaches us in Genesis that God made the physical world for man, for his use.
00:18:50.440Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, subdue it.
00:18:54.800That's the language that's used in the Scripture, to subdue the earth.
00:18:57.640Now, that's not an abusive kind of subduing.
00:19:00.860We're not to go out and harm it, obviously, and of course it has its own principles that we have to respect so that we don't do harm to it.
00:19:08.360But we are not at the service of nature.
00:19:12.580So this is a full frontal attack on our faith.
00:19:16.340It, in effect, would constitute another religion if we were to accept this.
00:19:20.440And, in fact, that seems to be what these people are.
00:19:23.000It certainly is what they're pushing in the preparatory document that we're talking about that was made as part of this process that these theologians that are so involved in this Synod are pushing.
00:19:35.500And it fits in exactly with what we've seen the Vatican doing.
00:19:39.420The Vatican has seemed to have accepted hook, line, and sinker everything that the Church fought, especially under John Paul II.
00:19:47.360John Paul II, at the United Nations, invited pro-lifers in to fight for the cause of life and family against the population controllers.
00:19:58.060And yet, since Pope Francis' pontificate, all the population controllers, including Paul Ehrlich, the father of it himself, have come to speak at the Vatican over and over and over again,
00:20:09.500such that even the bishop who heads it up, Bishop Sarando, has hook, line, and sinker proclaimed in one of those meetings that, you know, it's part of, he said, Catholic teaching.
00:20:22.980That we should have education for women so that women have one or two children and not seven.
00:20:29.920He sort of like imbibing the whole population control agenda that they've connected to the ecological agenda right into the heart of the Church, falsely making it a false religion.
00:20:40.280That definitely so, and it's really important that you bring this up, that this is very much connected.
00:20:48.520Once we can see the relationship, once we start to say that man is a component of nature, he really exists to serve it, he's one species among many, the greater entity really is nature.
00:21:01.840It's almost like a sort of a pantheism, right?
00:21:04.520Materialists tend towards a pantheistic worldview in which man is made simply into a component of the greater whole, and this greater whole functions like a deity.
00:21:58.840I mean, we've seen, you know, for decades and decades already, this, you know, environmental disaster is coming.
00:22:05.060Like every huge epic film from Hollywood is about the end of the world caused by ecological disaster because we're not paying attention to the greenhouse gases and so on and so forth.
00:22:27.940I think Chicken Little is actually a really good example when we look at Greta Thornburg and what's going on here.
00:22:32.460Where the chicken little story about bringing, you know, the littlest or the weakest of the chickens up to, you know, call alarm, alarm, oh, look what's going on.
00:22:42.480And the wolf is looking to eat all the chickens that are going out of the safety.
00:22:46.980It's where we're actually leading not only the whole society, which has been going on through the films and such, but now the church, too, being led out of the safety of the arms of Christ, the truth of Christ, into what is really a false religion.
00:23:02.900Definitely so. And it functions in two ways.
00:23:07.740One, of course, it just displaces the truth about our relationship with nature with an erroneous understanding.
00:23:14.120But it also turns people's attention away from the much deeper concerns of human existence.
00:23:21.540Of course, we should be concerned about caring for our environment, caring for the physical world that God gave us.
00:23:29.480Absolutely. Everybody agrees with that, though.
00:23:32.500But what they want us to do is to be so focused on that that we forget about these other issues.
00:23:38.780At least that's been the agenda of liberation theologians and other ideologically motivated groups typically associated with leftism in the church.
00:23:48.680They have sought to take our attention away from issues of sexual morality, the family, life, and focus us on secondary issues.
00:24:01.440I mean, without life, we don't we don't have the right to life without the without the respect for every individual human life, because every every human being is a we're not a cell in an organism merely.
00:24:12.460We have a unique immortal soul that God created for eternity with him.
00:24:19.040They they want to take us away from that spiritual struggle, that struggle to overcome sin and to be saved.
00:24:25.560Right. If the sanctification holiness and focus us on the practical problems of the physical world.
00:24:31.660And that that that that dovetails very well with a socialistic agenda, sort of neo-Marxist socialist agenda that's represented by much of this liberation theology and this sort of eco theology, as they call it, that also is collectivist, making man a component of something else of nature.
00:24:48.240It all fits into that. And it's very de-spiritualizing.
00:24:54.140The the pope is supposed to be the guarantor, the defender of the faith.
00:24:57.900What have you seen in your research about Pope Francis and his involvement in this agenda, in this Amazon synod agenda and the agenda of the the liberation theologians that have that have foisted this?
00:25:12.840Well, I didn't do I didn't for this particular document and coverage of it.
00:25:17.380I did not look much into Pope Francis's own role.
00:25:21.480I think it's clear, though, that he's favoring all of this.
00:25:24.620He knows what's happening and from his statements in general that he's made repeatedly in public about these kinds of issues with Vladal Tosi and with with his statements favoring liberation theologians specifically.
00:25:38.720He once even accepted a hammersickle crucifix from Avril Morales, didn't seem to think there was anything anything problematical about that.
00:25:50.520When we look at his general record, I don't think that there's any question that Pope Francis is the main impetus behind all of this.
00:25:59.520Obviously, he called for the Senate. He knows who's who's participating.
00:26:02.780And it's it's sad to have to say this, but but Pope Francis is is is himself promoting this.
00:26:09.380And I think he understands how grave it is.
00:26:12.800And he's heard the words of so many cardinals now, Cardinal Brandmuller, Cardinal Serra, Cardinal Burke and others.
00:26:23.880He's he's he's heard so many people raising their voices on this on this on this point and talking about how dire this is, that he's quite aware that that that this issue, it raises the possibility even of schism.
00:26:37.980And he's actually starting to speak about that.
00:26:40.040So he knows how dire the situation is and and he's continuing forth forward with that.
00:27:38.120And this might even be the worst, at least in terms of the spiritual realities of what's going on right now, might even be the worst thing the churches have experienced.
00:27:47.680But it should in no way lead anyone to leave the one true faith.
00:28:27.620But we should have confidence in our Lord Jesus Christ.
00:28:31.320And this is a wonderful opportunity, John Henry.
00:28:34.100I really think that we need to emphasize this.
00:28:36.620It's a wonderful opportunity for people to become aware of their personal responsibility to know the faith and not simply to to to to listen to to whatever the clergy happens to be saying today.
00:28:48.880As if the Catholic church, the Catholic faith could change from one moment to the next.
00:28:53.380They need to know what their faith is.
00:28:55.120And we need to get away from what really is a clericalism.
00:28:58.600And on that point, Pope Francis actually happens to be right.
00:29:01.340I don't think he's speaking of clericalism in the same way.
00:29:03.940But there really is a clericalism or there has been in the church in which people think that the clergy simply can be trusted to say the truth no matter what.
00:29:13.940In every circumstance, we don't have to know our faith.
00:29:16.040We simply listen to whatever they happen to be saying today.
00:29:58.360Well, Matthew Hoffman from LifeSite News, our Latin American correspondent, thank you for being with us today on the John Henry Weston Show.