Topsy and Tuptim Discuss Querida Amazonia Part III

Topsy and Tuptim just finished planting three dozen daffodil bulbs in random spots at Sacred Heart of Jesus cemetery. They stack all their gardening implements in a bin and stow it in the back of Topsy's Yukon. Topsy retrieves a picnic basket with a thermos, cups, and sandwiches which they take to a bench in the baby garden.

Topsy: (Filling a cup with coffee and handing it to Tuptim...) I love to sit in this section of the cemetery with all the little baby saints. They died in their innocence. What powerful intercessors they must be for all of us, such humble little ones resting in the arms of Our Lady. One of my grandchildren who died before birth is buried here. A precious little one I look forward to meeting some day.


Tuptim: (pointing to a statue of a little lamb) I'm always touched when you call your grandchildren "little lambs." It's such a lovely image and makes me think of the Good Shepherd embracing a tiny lamb in his arms.

Topsy: ( lip quivering...) It's hard to say good-bye. I have several little lambs in heaven who died before I had a chance to meet them. I look forward to our reunion. It will be like a big birthday party when we're born into eternal life.

Tuptim gives Topsy a hug. They're quiet for a few minutes.

Topsy: I know people who hate cemeteries, but I always feel such a sense of peace as I walk around praying for the dead. After all, this is the destination for all of us, the only "common ground" we can all look forward to after we finish the race.

Tuptim: (sighing...) It feels like a combined marathon/obstacle course these days. (She takes her copy of the exhortation out of her bag.) Shall we discuss the next two "dreams" of Pope Francis? (She rolls her eyes...) -- his "cultural" and "ecological" dreams? These two chapters seemed like something from the Sierra Club to me. I'm so sick of Church documents with language that sanctifies the earth.

Topsy: (Nodding...) I agree. I read Bishop Schneider's commentary about the document and a few other opinion pieces on both sides. There's really a mixed reaction. The heathens are raging. Some of the orthodox think it marks a sea change in Francis for the good.

Tuptim: Hmph! I'm not that optimistic! I think, like any socialist, he just takes the long view. If you can take two steps forward and only one step back, you still make progress.

Topsy: Well, you never know. One can hope that he'll have a Becket moment and a conversion of heart.

Tuptim: (shaking her head...) Hope springs eternal, eh? I'll believe it when he stops surrounding himself with really bad men and stops throwing the good ones under the bus.

Topsy: Anyway, Bishop Schneider says most observers say the doc caused a "spiritual earthquake." The libs are having a hissy fit and the orthodox mostly seem relieved that Francis didn't outright approve of married priests and female ordination. I thought Bishop Schneider's summary of the situation up to now was totally on target. I highlighted some of it. The litany of the "progressive's" successes is depressing! (She reads.):

The apostolic norm of priestly celibacy and the divinely revealed truth of sacramental ordination reserved to the male sex constituted the last bastion of Roman Catholicism, and the secularized and protestantizing networks in the Church have not yet succeeded in razing it. They succeeded in seriously damaging the bastion of the perennial law of prayer, the lex orandi, through a universal implementation of protestantizing elements in the form and content of liturgical celebrations. They succeeded, in practice, in introducing divorce through the papal approval of local norms on the admittance of Catholics who are living in adulterous unions to Holy Communion. They succeeded in legitimizing homosexual activity within the Church by the fact that cardinals and bishops have gone unpunished in openly supporting “Gay Pride” events and activists of so-called “LGBT” groups. They succeeded in turning the leadership of the Catholic Church, and concretely the Pope, away from the primacy of the supernatural and eternal in the Church’s mission, so as to give equal significance to the mission of caring for material and temporal realities, such as climate, the environment, or the Amazon biome, equating thereby the natural with the supernatural, the kingdom of heaven with the kingdom of earth, the profane with the sacred — and thereby sacralizing the natural and desacralizing the supernatural. They succeeded in relativizing the truth of the Catholic Faith as the only true religion willed by God, through a relativistic theory and practice of ecumenism and interreligious dialogue. They succeeded in abolishing the First Commandment of the Decalogue through the historically unprecedented act of a cultic veneration in the Vatican (the heart of the Catholicism) of a Pachamama statue, a chief symbol of the indigenous pagan religion of the native peoples of South America.

Tuptim: (Dropping her head....) Horrible! And it just goes on and on!

Topsy: But here's the encouraging ending after that depressing list:

In light of such targeted and well-orchestrated attacks on the Deposit of Faith and all that is genuinely Catholic, Pope Francis’s refusal to weaken or change the law of priestly celibacy and to approve a sacramental female diaconal ordination is of historic significance and deserves recognition and gratitude from all true sons and daughters of the Church.

Like the Blessed Mother told Lucia at Fatima, the last battle is for the family. I think she meant both the nuclear family and family of the Church. So that's why they so relentless attack our priestly "fathers."

Tuptim: (Tilting her head and looking thoughtful...) Well...I think this is just a delay. If the devil has one perverted virtue it's patience in carrying out his evil. If he can't do it by blitzkrieg, he'll do it taking one little step at a time and even take a step backwards if he has to.

Topsy: You may be right. Another day another synod. I was just glad the May meeting of the Global Education Pact got postponed.

Tuptim: They always go after the kids! (She waves her copy of the exhortation.) Shall we talk about the pope's "dreams?" He is so boringly focused on climate change and earth worship.

Topsy: (Nodding...) Bishop Schneider criticized the pantheism in the document. I'll read just two paragraphs he wrote about that. (She turns a page and searches for the text.) Ah...here it is:

Yet in noting the improvements made in Querida Amazonia, one cannot be silent about the lamentable doctrinal ambiguities and errors it contains, as well as its dangerous ideological tendencies. Highly problematic, for example, is Querida Amazonia’s implicit endorsement of a pantheistic and pagan spirituality, when it speaks of the material earth as a “sacred mystery” (n. 5); of entering into communion with nature: “we enter into communion with the forest” (n. 56); of the Amazon biome as a “theological locus” (n. 57). The affirmation that the Amazon river is “the hidden eternity” (n. 44) and that “only poetry, with its humble voice, will be able to save this world” (n. 46) comes close to pantheism and paganism. A Christian cannot subscribe to such ideas and expressions.....

One of the main erroneous tendencies in Querida Amazonia is its promotion of naturalism, and slight echoes of pantheism and a hidden Pelagianism. Such tendencies may be detected in the excessive emphasis and value it places on care for natural, earthly and temporal realities. Such reductionism confines the existence of creatures and mankind predominantly to the realm of the natural order. This naturalistic and neo-pelagian tendency is, in fact, the spiritual disease that has most characterized and damaged the life of the Church since the Second Vatican Council. Querida Amazonia is evidence of this tendency, although in a somewhat mitigated form compared with the Final Document of the Amazon Synod....The material creation suffers precisely because of the lack of the supernatural life of Christ’s grace in the souls of men.

 Tuptim: I kept having the gag reflex over all the talk equating the earth with people -- the forest is a "being or various beings" and we have to "relate" to it. The land has blood and is bleeding because of the evil companies cutting her "veins." Water is "the queen".... and the Amazon region is "like a mother to us." (She looks up from her notes.) I thought the queen and our mother was Our Lady!

Topsy: What did you think of this? (She reads...) "If we enter in to communion with the forest, our voices will easily blend with its own and become a prayer." (Looking up...) Do you think the forest prays in Latin?

Tuptim: (Laughing...) Oh don't be so pre-Vatican II. The oaks speak English. The maples speak French. The flowering trees speak Italian and the firs and pines speak the Scandanavian languages. And all the indigenous trees have their own particular tongue. What trees do the silk worms live on? They speak Japanese. Oh and I have a Chinese snowball tree in my yard. I'm pretty sure it speaks Mandarin.

Topsy: (Laughing...) You're too funny. Sounds like the tower of babel.

Tuptim: What made me particularly angry about the document is the unrelenting attack on businesses. The pope's hates capitalism! Capitalism certainly has its faults, especially crony capitalism and a capitalism that puts profit above people, but I've known many good people who own and run businesses that treat their employees fairly and everbody thrives. (Pausing...) It's just so hypocritical. Do you think the nuns who take care of Francis go down and wash his cassocks in the Tiber and dry them on clotheslines? They use washers and dryers manufactured by...who knows...Westinghouse? I doubt if they're cooking his meals and making his coffee in the fireplace or heating his room with a wood stove! And he certainly isn't riding a donkey for all his jaunting around the world. Who manufacturers the automobiles and airplanes he uses.  (Sighs...) All these men live very comfortably. Hey, even the pencils and pens they use need businesses to produce them. I doubt if Francis signed the exhortation with a bird-feather quill and homemade ink on homemade paper.

Topsy: (A little heatedly...) And what about all the elitists Vatican officials hobnob with? How environmentally friendly is the lifestyle of Bill and Melinda Gates and the rest of the folks influencing Vatican meetings. Does Jeffrey Sachs live in a hovel? Do the bishops who promoted all this nonsense at the Amazon Synod? Are they going to go live in the idyllic environment they've painted of the indigenous people in their huts suffering from malaria and other diseases! It really is the epitome of hypocrisy! And the worst part is that the highest price, life itself, is being paid by the littlest lambs. All the climate gurus want their "sustainable" environment created over the bloody corpses of Christ's "least ones," the babies in the womb and the vulnerable who have no means to resist them. Are the multinational corporations more guilty than the murderers of innocence who masquerade as philanthropists and government fixers? (Shakes her head...) I'll get down off my soapbox now.

Tuptim: Why don't we stop here and leave the pope's last dream for another day. We can pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy for all our clergy. What a blessing it would be if they really imitate the good shepherd and protect the most vulnerable among us. (She makes the Sign of the Cross.) "My Jesus, I trust in You."

[See Part I and Part II]