Listening to the forest

The Church returns to the Amazon, where Catholic mysticism and Global South fury expose the West’s failure to act, argues Liam Stokes.

The earth is at the same time mother; she is mother of all that is natural, mother of all that is human. (St Hildegard of Bingen)

We can love the Amazon, not simply use it, with the result that love can awaken a deep and sincere interest. Even more, we can feel intimately a part of it and not only defend it; then the Amazon region will once more become like a mother to us. (Pope Francis, Querida Amazonia)

The Amazon basin is difficult, contested terrain for the Church. At once the inspiration for some of the most mystic, sacral thinking on the nature of creation committed to paper in modern times and the battleground over which the ‘pachamama’ wars were fought.

I imagine there were sweaty brows and chewed nails among the Catholic hierarchy at the prospect of returning to the topic of Amazonian preservation, as the world descended upon Belém, Brazil, for the annual check up on global environmentalism.

Six years ago Pope Francis invited the rainforest into the Vatican for the Amazon Synod, and penned the lovely Querida Amazonia. There he conjured a forest as ‘theological locus, a space where God himself reveals himself and summons his sons and daughters’.

He turned to Mary in soaring supplication:

Show yourself the Mother of all creatures,
in the beauty of the flowers, the rivers,
the great river that courses through it
and all the life pulsing in its forests.
Tenderly care for this explosion of beauty.

But no one remembers the Synod for that glorious mysticism. What people remember is the splash heard throughout the Catholic world, as statues of a pregnant indigenous woman known to history as ‘pachamama’ were cast into the Tiber.

The entire fiasco was a PR disaster that I won’t rehash here. I have nothing to add except to note that these self-inflicted wounds are the scourge of our efforts to embrace a mystical view of creation, and are so often the result of allowing ambiguities to creep in when absolute precision is needed to protect against the accusation of syncretism or pantheism.

Pope Leo is embracing his role as ‘the greatest bridge-builder’ (Pontifex Maximus) as he seeks to reconnect his fragmented flock. I doubt he relished a return to the Amazon. Yet that is where the global community gathered this year for COP30, and he has made his commitment to the cause of creation clear. The Church would not be absent.

As the Amazon Synod brought the jungle symbolically to Rome, COP30 took the discussion into the heart of the forest in a way that was unmissable and pressing. I hear from those who were there that the rain battered so hard on the building that some of the delegates could not be heard.

As if the forest itself were forcing its own voice onto the podium.

Because for all the gorgeous sacral language and the ferocity of the culture warring, the Amazon is not a metaphor. It is a landscape of earth, fungi and leaf, fur, feather and scale. A landscape that is being flattened and felled and burned and drilled, at a rate of 10-40 square miles every day.

That’s between 8-30 NY Central Parks. Or 3-11 of London’s Richmond Park. Daily.

Something odd happens to many Christians at this point. I have pointed out elsewhere that conservative Christians in the US and Italy cared less about the environment once they heard Pope Francis speak about it.

The practical business of protecting the environment is coded as wet and liberal and not what proper Christians concern themselves with.

Yet many of the bishops they look to for moral clarity are the most fearsome green radicals.

The bishops of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM) planted their feet and refused to move an inch in the face of Pope Francis’s moral innovations.

SECAM president Cardinal Ambongo led the resistance to Fiducia Supplicans, a document which seemed to show openness to homosexual activity by offering a blessing to same-sex couples, to loud acclaim from furious western conservatives.

Yet Cardinal Ambongo is also a veteran environmental campaigner, a warrior on behalf of the besieged Congo basin that partners the Amazon as the lungs of our planet.

He rages with prophetic fury as he blasts the Global North’s lacklustre response to a situation he characterises as a ‘moral and ecological emergency’. He writes:

Climate change is a moral outrage and a tragic and striking example of structural sin, facilitated by callous indifference and selfish greed.

Ambongo was in the Amazon for COP30, co-chairing the Global South’s first ever event at a UN climate conference. He was among the Global South leaders who set out their expectations back in the summer when they wrote:

At COP 30 we demand that States take transformative action based on human dignity, the common good, solidarity and social justice, prioritizing the most vulnerable, including our sister Mother Earth. The Church will not remain silent.

So wrote the Catholic bishops of Asia, Africa and Latin America in an extraordinary common appeal.

There is nothing wet or mealy mouthed about the Global South approach to the environment. 

See this from the recent ‘Call for Climate Justice and our Common Home’ from the Catholic Episcopal Conferences and Councils of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean:

The climate crisis is an urgent reality, with global warming reaching 1.55°C in 2024. It is not just a technical problem: it is an existential issue of justice, dignity and care for our common home.

The science is clear: we must limit global warming to 1.5°C to avoid catastrophic effects. We must never abandon this goal. It is the Global South and future generations who are already suffering the consequences.

We reject false solutions such as ‘green’ capitalism, technocracy, the commodification of nature, and extractivism, which perpetuate exploitation and injustice.

The document calls for rich countries to finance climate action, for economic degrowth, an end to all new fossil fuels infrastructure, and taxes on those who have profited from their exploitation. It bears Ambongo’s signature.

I suspect he will have left COP 30 unsatisfied.

There were gestures toward the demands of the Global South: a new tropical forest protection facility, warm words about indigenous leadership, and promises to shield the vulnerable from climate change.

Yet much of it felt nebulous. When the moment came to commit to fossil fuel phase-out, agreements blurred into the voluntary or conditional. The forest may have thundered as the delegates spoke, yet the conference petered out into clouds of mist.

So it seems once again that “humanity has disappointed God’s expectations,” as St John Paul II once said. “Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters, disfigured the earth’s habitat, made the air unbreathable.”

It might all feel so dispiriting.

Yet St John Paul II did not conclude with that sense of disappointment. Writing with the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in 2002, he said:

God has not abandoned the world. It is His will that His design and our hope for it will be realized through our co-operation in restoring its original harmony.

We know how the story ends: God wins. What is left to us is cooperation in that victory, ‘to be stewards called to collaborate with God in watching over creation in holiness and wisdom’.

The Amazon, or indeed the Congo, might seem many miles away. Yet we are both practically and mystically connected to the forests that provide the air we breathe and govern the weather under which we live.

The rain that falls on our fields is the same water that lifts in a ghostly haze from the ancient trees of the tropics.

The Western Christian is warmed by this enchantment, yet recoils from the activism that works to protect it. Our firebrand African leaders show us a different way. 

Theologically conservative and environmentally radical, they embody the holistic response demanded by the suffering of creation.

Their witness reminds us to pray, to act, and to prophesy. To contemplate nature as a locus of His presence, to garden our own corner of creation, and to lend our voices to the cry of the earth.

This is a very slightly edited version of an article which first appeared on Liam Stokes’ Substack: Liam Stokes: Nature, Faith and Fantasy. See here. For the original article, click here. It is re-published in Adamah Media with the author’s permission.

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