#medieval catholicisim

[milkywayan]

There is currently an exhibition about a medieval nunnery in Stift Klosterneuburg, near Vienna and of course I had to go there and take pictures of everything

It is a great exhibition, with SO MANY PRIMARY SOURCES!!!!!! Notes, ledgers, directives, logs, diaries, calendars, school books, prayer books, song books, books about healing medicine including tips what to do against period cramps - the list goes on. Written both in middle high german and latin, so I could read a lot of it :D

It was perfect for my current medieval nun obsession, and provided me with a lot of interesting new research points

If you are into that stuff, it is absolutely worth a visit, next to the church being super pretty and Klosterneuburg just being super cute

[militant-holy-knight]

My Very Belated Take on the Amazon Synod

As a Brazilian Catholic, how I feel about something that concerns my country and my faith.

So I am three months late to talk about something that happened literally last year in October, but health reasons prevented me from fully focusing on it. This is an topic that many friends have asked me to discuss regarding the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region given that it’s located within my country Brazil, as well as pretty much all northern countries in South America (Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, etc.). It has been a very concerning and controversial topic among Catholics and if you want a short answer for what I think: the Synod is horribly misguided, seeks easy answers for complex situations and critics are right to be upset. I will elaborate why below and tried to be as nuanced as possible.

For the longest time, ordination of women was a topic advocated by several liberal movements in Catholicism for a variety of reasons, but in context of the Synod, it was to address the priesthood shortage within the Amazon region. This has been a problem for decades, and in Brazil in particular, part of a greater issue regarding the clergy being undisciplined and poorly trained even during the Imperial days when Catholicism was the state religion of my country. In addition, married men and lay people were also cogitated to become priests for the same reason. 

It should be noted that this has been allowed in the Eastern Catholic Rite where married men are allowed to become priests, though they can’t marry again should their spouse dies. While my position on the ordination of women is very clear (it’s a nope), in theory it probably wouldn’t be such a big problem if at least married men could become priests, right? Well, it has been pointed out by Greek-Catholics that even this measure hasn’t helped the shortage of priests within their own rite, so it’s not an very practical solution to the problem in the Amazon.

Another big problem is the interaction with the natives and the focus on the environment because sometimes I wonder if the Vatican really understand the complexity of the situation regarding them. I’ve read the documents and I was frustrated at the misguided attempts at ecumenism towards a culture that is drastically different (for example, quoting Exodus 3:5 in context of the ground, i.e. the land being sacred to the natives too). Furthermore, they tend to view the natives’ unrest against encroaching farmers and landowners in black and white, when the reality is far more complicated and they are siding with the ones least willing to compromise. There is also the fact plenty of these tribes haven’t been contacted and are still vulnerable to common diseases we are immune to.

Now, the most controversial part the Synod is definitely the Pachamama idol, the pre-Colombia deity that used to be worshiped (and it still is) by many Latin American tribes. So for reference: I am not exactly a Traditionalist Catholic, I’m a pretty average Roman Catholic (i.e. I don��t mind Novus Ordus), but even then, the idols being displayed in the Vatican were completely unacceptable. Not even during my secular years in college I would have approved that. I would have probably criticized the two Austrian men who threw that idol in the Tiber in other circumstances (I would have argued it should have been kept as a museum piece - where it should have belong rather than being worshiped), but I was so livid that I really didn’t care and I applauded it.

There is a explanation to all of this: Pope Francis is very concerned with respecting people of other cultures and at the same time, he understands that there is a crisis in the church and wants to invite more people into it. As such, he is willing to compromise with them so they can enter on their terms instead of the Church’s. Hence, the Pachamama idol is incorporated into Catholicism in order to make it more palatable to natives. I know some people are going to use medieval examples where pagan deities were “identified” as Christian symbols in order to bring Europeans under Christendom in order to set up an precedent for this event, but honestly, it doesn’t cut it. To cut a long story short, the circumstances back then do not apply now and they didn’t affect the church as much as this whole debacle is doing.

So while I pretty much side with the critics on this situation, I do have to say an inconvenient truth: many have failed to provide a solution or at least an alternative to the Synod. Granted, this is an very difficult answer and probably beyond even the ability of Latin American countries to answer, but the responses I’ve gotten are really disheartening like “we should leave them alone because they are unimportant”, “forcing them to Catholicisim would be colonialism” (even though no one suggested that) or that simply the Synod shouldn’t have happened regardless of motivations or circumstances. 

It’s very frustrating that Traditional Catholics don’t usually care about the problems of the World, but complain without doing anything about it in general. This illustrated by one advice I recall being given by Trads who strongly disagreed about Francis’ teachings: “wait”. We have to wait until he passes on and a new Pope takes place. I can understand that somewhat because it’s better to say nothing/do nothing than disobey him or not consider him a Pope, but still inaction is inaction. 

A friend of mine said that fixing the church’s problem should take priority over evangelizing natives which is a position I find very agreeable. Why bring natives into the church while it’s in disarray - and even worse, unintentionally make them part of the problem? I could say the evangelization of Latin America was only possible because of Counter-Reformation institutions. Of course, some might say that evangelization is more important than reforming, but this is up to your personal opinion. 

Missionary work is important for we are called to be fishers of men. I am not saying the Amazon Synod was malevolent or anything because it’s trying to address a problem that has been going on for a long time, which isn’t helped by outside factors like governments being incapable of protecting missionaries without infringing on the natives’ rights. The main problem is that the Synod is completely misguided in how it’s conducted.

I conclude by saying I wish I had an answer for this, but the Amazon Synod is actually more delicate than many detractors seem to believe. There are actual problems it intends to solve and I am not very opposed to some of it’s methods (in theory that is, in practice that is another story), but the Pachamama display made it all much harder to support. Which is all made more tragic.

What are your thoughts on the Synod? Give me your thoughts and what do you think it should have been done?