Is This Anything Close to Christianity? Pope Opens Amazon Synod With A REALLY Weird Ritual
By Wes Walker
DCDirtyLaundry.com
October 8, 2019
In what possible world did THIS seem like a good idea?
A ‘synod’ is a when a Christian church — in this case, Catholic — has a general meeting for all members of the denomination around the world. It’s where the come together and wrestle with issues of the day, and come to agreement about what direction they are to take in the future.
By nature, such an event blends elements of religious worship and of business meetings.
This year, it’s the Amazon Synod, and it opened in a way that shocked and disgusted many Christians.
It also left many observers with serious questions about what it is that the Pope really believes.
On Saturday, Pope Francis along with Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes and Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri (both leaders of the synod) attended an indigenous ritual, a tree-planting ceremony in the Vatican gardens. Participants danced around a mandala, spread soil from “symbolic places,” and bowed to two female fertility figures. A male figure with erect penis lay nearby. (See here.)
The pope himself threw in the first shovelful of dirt. After sitting for an hour in the hot Roman sun, he looked tired and chose to set aside his prepared remarks. He just recited an Our Father without comment, and left.
This is no small matter and it’s difficult to see how cardinals and bishops simply let it pass. Many don’t, privately, but this will have major public repercussions, not least the scandal of suggesting that Christ is not the only way to the Father — which the Vatican seems more and more ready to allow. (We have here another example of confusion over the Abu Dhabi Statement that Pope Francis signed asserting that God willed a “pluralism and diversity of religions.”) Giving the impression that non-Catholics are pretty much fine where they already are is the quickest way to tamp down enthusiasm for evangelizing — which this synod is supposed to be encouraging.
It’s worth remembering too that fertility gods were associated with child sacrifice in the ancient Mideast; Jewish monotheism definitively broke with all that. Some indigenous gods in the New World, too, notoriously demanded human sacrifice.
The Rest…HERE
