Amazon

I’m sure you know that in Greek mythology the Amazons were a tribe of warrior women, located in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean. The name and concept persists in Europe through the Medieval and early Renaissance periods. Then it’s applied to a whole area of South America drained by a massive river system because an explorer reported that he saw some warlike women. It continues to form our imaginations today – see the movie Wonder Woman. And we all see “Amazon” on boxes every day; Jeff Bezos selected it because it began with A, represented an “exotic and different” place, and was the largest river in the world – his goal for his “bookstore,” back then. No gender context at all.

However, there is something of interest regarding gender as Vatican plans go forward for a Special Assembly of Amazon bishops in 2019. The problem it will address is evangelization of the indigenous people in that environmentally-delicate region. I wrote about this last fall:

The Amazon is so huge and the communities are so remote that the present supply of circuit-riding priests cannot serve them. … Various bishops helped Francis see how to look at the suffering and how to figure out a way to go beyond the rules. Archbishop Salvador Pineiro Garcia-Calderon, president of the Peruvian bishops’ conference, initially proposed the Synod in May. Francis’s close friend, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, heads the Amazon regional bishops’ conference and is especially concerned about the shortage of priests, according to Leonardo Boff, liberation theologian. Retired Bishop Erwin Krautler, secretary of the Brazilian bishops’ conference, made the request for married men and women deacons. While I hate to rely on bishops, I know the difference good ones can make.

One of my interests is which bishops we might influence about expanding Francis’s understanding of women, not to mention women’s ordination, and here are some who seem to have his ear because of their work in Latin America.

Now we have a preliminary document for this meeting, issued June 8. LaCroix reports on some key provisions. Especially important to me is that the driving force is to better provide the sacraments to the indigenous population – using indigenous people, men and women. The imagination here is way beyond a colonial mentality. And what happens when hidebound categories are abandoned? “Along these lines, it is necessary to identify the type of official ministry that can be conferred on women, taking into account the central role which women play today in the Amazonian church,” the document states.

To have women’s “central role” formally recognized seems to me a great leap forward, and one we have known about for a long time in Latin American small faith communities. While women play a “central role” in lots of churches I can think of, the grassroots emphasis of liberation theology specifically facilitates the leadership of the people, especially women.

Young members of an indigenous group from the Amazon region listen during a meeting with Pope Francis during a Jan. 19 meeting at Madre de Dios stadium in Puerto Maldonado, Peru. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)

America and NCR have even longer articles on this document. This is the stage of meeting preparation in which the Vatican poses questions for those involved to answer. The key one is, “The role of women in our communities is of utmost importance, how can we recognize and value them on our new paths?”

Again the theme: women are crucial to providing greater access to the sacraments in this region. The request is for locals to provide ideas about how they can minister in this wide, difficult territory. Ladies of the Amazon, step up creatively!

Pope Francis is pastoral, and his willingness to approve this meeting and its preparatory document grows out of a deep concern both for the people and the environment of the Amazon. While clerical leaders are quick to say that whatever creative solutions are developed here does not mean that they will be applied to the universal church, I say, wait and see. We also can step up creatively!

I emphasize the pastoral orientation of Francis because I so thoroughly respect it, despite the Pope’s failure to understand women and our issues. San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy made a remarkable address to the June 26 national assembly of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests. He is another bishop I trust because he puts himself on the line at lefty but insider meetings like this, as well as on the border and in the USCCB. Does anyone have McElroy’s ear on women’s issues?

The NCR article is well worth reading for a quick update to whatever theology courses you may have had. I want to gasp along with the audience, as Dan Morris-Young reports:

The bishop drew an audible reaction from the more than 200 AUSCP participants when he said that while opponents of “elements of the pastoral mission of Pope Francis” often argue that “doctrine cannot be superseded by the pastoral,” it is “equally important to recognize that the pastoral cannot by eclipsed by doctrine.” [emphasis added]

“And pastoral authority is as important as philosophical authenticity or authenticity in law contouring the life of the church to the charter which our Lord himself has given us,” he said. In “enormously important ways, the vision of pastoral theology embraced by Pope Francis is a rejection of the tradition which sees pastoral theology as primarily derivative.”

McElroy argues that pastoral theology must be derived from the lived experience of the people of the church. We have been so confined by the primacy of supposedly immutable doctrine and by rules developed in other eras that no longer apply. Let us follow what I hope will be the example of the women of the Amazon. We can be warrior women as well.