Fatima Perspectives #1330
The growing chorus of outrage over the absurdly heterodox Instrumentum Laboris (IL) for the preposterously inappropriate Synod on the Pan-Amazonian region now includes a bishop from that very region. [Editor’s Note: Loosely translated, Instrumentum Laboris means “working document.” It is a Vatican document that sets the agenda and topics of discussion for an episcopal synod. There are various procedures by which a synod is conducted and through which this working document will be adjusted so as to produce the synod’s final document. The IL is a post-Vatican II novelty and was first used in 1974.]
A report by the indispensable LifeSiteNews summarizes the remarks of a retired bishop — why is it always a retired bishop who speaks out with such frankness? — on the folly of the upcoming Synod. José Luiz Azcona Hermoso, O.A.R., who was bishop of Brazil’s Territorial Prelature of Marajó until Pope Francis retired him, made the salient point (as summarized by LifeSite) that “the Instrumentum Laboris for the upcoming Synod did not address the most pressing issues of the Amazon region, principally its embrace of Pentecostalism, rampant child abuse including pedophilia, and other evils lurking in the area.”
LifeSite notes that the IL “has been critiqued by a growing number of prelates, theologians, philosophers, and writers, including Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, Professor Thomas Stark, Dom Giulio Meiattini, Monsignor Nicola Bux, Fr. Gerald Murray, Robert Royal, and Damian Thompson.” But this episcopal critic was actually a local ordinary of the region in question. And his assessment of its moral and spiritual condition is devastating to the mythology that the IL and the synod it will govern are attempting to implant in the Church.
Some of the bishop’s key remarks:
- “ … The Amazon, at least the Brazilian Amazon, is no longer Catholic,” but rather now has “a Pentecostal majority” that “reaches 80 percent.” So much for the “New Evangelization,” which, like so many of the post-Vatican II slogans that have proliferated in the Church, is a Stalinesque inversion of the truth, which is “No Evangelization.”
- Pentecostalism is “today’s Amazonian face,” but there is “not one word about this point” in the IL.
- The children of the Amazonian tribes that the IL ludicrously depicts as noble savages whose “cosmosvision” should inform the Church, are “re-victimized and denigrated children, (abused) by their own parents and relatives, subjected to a slavery that forms an essential part of the abandoned and destroyed face of Jesus in the Amazon.”
- Still worse, according to Bishop Azcona, is that “there were 25,000 reports of pedophiliac crimes in Pará, a northern state of Brazil, in a single year.” But, “According to experts in this area, for every reported case of pedophilia there are four others besides. If during approximately one year there were 100,000 abused children in Pará, isn’t this face of destroyed children an essential part of the Amazonian face?”
- And then this damning question: “Where is the defense of the Amazon, of its children, in the Instrumentum laboris, and, therefore, in the synod?”
“Let’s stop these false projections about the Amazon,” the bishop continued, “and instead make possible new paths for it. … The tendency to equalize the indigenous cultures with the Gospel is overwhelming. Forgetting this fundamental principle renders the synod useless and nullifies the specific and unique power of God in the Gospel, as well as all missionary dynamism in the Amazon and from the Amazon.”
As is the case with so many of the post-Vatican II documents, and even with the conciliar document Gaudium et spes, says the bishop regarding the IL: “Pelagianism [is] spread throughout the document… attributing to the Amazonian man, to his ethnic and cultural groups, more than what belongs to them, because they are realities created and marked by sin, and it supplants the solid conciliar doctrine about the Gospel and the mission of the Church in the power of the Risen One…”
Bishop Azcona further protests that the IL studiously ignores the obvious influence of the diabolical in the degraded way of life that the IL outrageously romanticizes: “… In no part of the Instrumenum laboris is the presence of demons spoken of, or their influence, their malice in persons, peoples and cultures, as well as the victory of Christ, his deliverance and the destruction of the power of the Evil One.”
But then, is it not obvious that it is precisely the Evil One who has a hand in this synodal grotesquerie? For it is nothing other than “diabolical disorientation” that afflicts so much of the Church’s leadership today, as Sister Lucy warned repeatedly in the letters she sent from the convent in which she was confined under Vatican orders to allow no visitors besides close friends and relatives. The better to avoid her disclosure of something pertaining to the Third Secret of Fatima whose horrendous fulfillment we are now witnessing — the Secret she was at first too frightened to commit to paper.
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