What the Amazon really needs

Catholic Herald, 31 October 2019

Pope Francis suggested that his apostolic exhortation following the Amazon synod could be completed before the end of the year. The Holy Father is certainly capable of it. In 2015, the draft of Amoris Laetitia was delivered to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before the feast of the Immaculate Conception, less than six weeks after the synod’s end, and that was the longest papal document in Church history.

A target date of November 30, the feast of St Andrew, would be suitable. That was the date in 1919 of Maximum Illud, the apostolic letter of Pope Benedict XV calling for a renewal of missionary fervour in distant lands.

Indeed, to commemorate the centenary of Maximum Illud the Holy Father declared October 2019 to be an Extraordinary Missionary Month. Benedict XV’s apostolic letter is extraordinary in itself. Just a year after the civilisational suicide of the Great War – a catastrophic failure of Christian countries from which European Christianity has still not recovered – the Roman Pontiff was able to summon the Church’s energies to “dispatch to every corner of the world her couriers of the doctrine God entrusted to her, and her ministers of the eternal salvation that was delivered through Christ to the human race.”

In the prayer Pope Francis composed for the Extraordinary Missionary Month, the Holy Father prays “that the mission entrusted to the Church, which is still very far from completion, may find new and efficacious expressions”.

Maximum Illud did not appear to have much influence on the recent Amazon synod. Indeed, the final synod report gave Maximum Illud the same treatment that Amoris Laetitia gave to Veritatis Splendor, namely pretending that it did not exist, with no citations at all.

Benedict XV’s missionary confidence was absent from the Amazon synod.

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