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RIO DE JANEIRO: When the Archbishop of the Brazilian metropolis of Manaus Leonardo Steiner kneels earlier than Pope Francis on August 27, the Brazilian clergyman will make historical past as the primary cardinal to return from the Amazon area.
“The communities really feel that the space between Rome and the Amazon is now smaller,” Steiner advised The Related Press in a written interview. “Maybe that is the explanation for the Amazonian individuals’s pleasure with Pope Francis’ transfer.”
Steiner attributed his choice to 4 priorities of the pope: the need to do extra missionary work within the Amazon and to be attentive to the poor; to take care of the Amazon “as our widespread house” and to be a Church that “is aware of contribute to the autonomy of Indigenous individuals.”
Sprawling throughout 9 international locations, the Amazon area is bigger than the European Union. It’s house to 34 million individuals, of whom greater than three million are Indigenous, belonging to round 400 ethnic teams, in keeping with the Catholic Church.
There’s a non secular lens by which to see the acute environmental struggles taking part in out within the area as nicely: The Catholic Church’s socio-environmental agenda is a contentious challenge with quite a few Brazilian Pentecostal church buildings. These have a strong caucus in Brazil’s parliament and have embraced the pro-agrobusiness beef caucus in Congress. Each Pentecostals and cattle business advocates belong to far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s political base.
Cardinals are probably the most senior clergy under the pope. Usually known as “crimson hats” due to the colour of their skullcaps, they function papal advisors. Extra essential, collectively they choose every pope, the chief of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics.
For observers of the church, it would come as no shock that Francis has lastly named an Amazonian cardinal, given the significance the area has had for his papacy and the eye he has proven it.
POPE FRANCIS’ ENVIRONMENTAL AWAKENING
Francis was first moved by the plight of the huge Amazon basin in 2007, through the Episcopal Council of Latin American Bishops Convention, in keeping with the Brazilian priest and historian José Oscar Beozzo. Francis was at the moment the archbishop of Buenos Aires, and helped write the official account of the convention. The ultimate textual content advocates for the preservation of each the Amazon and Antarctica.
Francis then devoted a whole synod, or assembly, of bishops from the area in 2019. In his environmental awakening, crystallized in his 2015 encyclical “Praised Be,” he advocates for the preservation of the area’s biodiversity and portrays Indigenous peoples as forest guardians. In 2018, he additionally visited Madre de Dios, a area within the Peruvian Amazon devastated by unlawful mining and logging.
The pope made Steiner archbishop of Manaus simply after the Amazon synod ended, tapping a Franciscan who clearly shares the identical ethos and beliefs because the pope’s namesake, St. Francis. The pope could have observed Steiner as a result of he had a outstanding place within the Brazilian bishops’ convention and was performing as its secretary-general from 2011-2019. He additionally has severe Roman credentials, having served because the secretary-general of the Franciscans’ Pontifical Antonianum College in Rome, one of many main pontifical universities.
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