Viganò: ‘Christ is Absent’ From Amazon Synod Working Document

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ROME (ChurchMilitant.com) - Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò is sounding alarm over the upcoming Amazon Synod.

Speaking to Dr. Robert Moynihan, founder and editor-in-chief of Inside the Vatican, Abp. Viganò said earlier this week that the Instrumentum Laboris — the synod's working document — is an alarming sign that post-Christian ideology is gathering strength inside the Church.

"Where is the Christian message here?" he asked. "In fact, the figure of Christ is absent. The Synod working document testifies to the emergence of a post-Christian Catholic theology, now, in this moment. And this is very troubling. It is against everything I have worked for and believed for all my life."

Let's consider the history of the Jesuits. That is something I am studying now with great care. In fact, if you would like to know the synthesis of my thought, it is this: What we are now seeing is the triumph of a 60-year-old plan, the successful execution of a well-thought out plan to bring a new sort of thinking into the heart of the Church, a thinking rooted in elements of Liberation Theology containing strands of Marxism, little interested in traditional Catholic liturgy or morality or theology, but rather focused on "praxis" in the field of social justice. And now this plan has achieved one of its supreme goals, with a Jesuit on the See of Peter.

Viganò's comments echo those of Peruvian liberation theology expert Julio Loredo, editor of watchdog website Pan-Amazon Synod Watch. In a June interview with LifeSiteNews, Loredo slammed the synod as the culmination of a radical scheme to overthrow Catholic orthodoxy:

There is an untold story that has not gotten enough attention in the Western media. Cardinal Pedro Barreto, the vice president of REPAM (Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network) said very clearly in recent days that the plan they intend to carry out at the Synod is one they have been working on for almost 50 years. So, there is a whole plan, a whole scheme, behind the Synod, which consists in the introduction of so-called indigenist liberation theology that has been developing over the past 40 or 50 years. Now would be their time to propose it to the entire Church.

"European media are focusing on clerical celibacy and the possible diaconal 'ordination' for women, and rightly so," Loredo continued. "These are both very important aspects of the plan, but there is a whole story behind it. What they want is to change the whole Church according to the most radical versions of liberation theology — the so-called indigenist and ecological theology."

"This Synod is being prepared and staffed by a well-organized network of 'indigenist' associations and movements," he said. "All its mentors come from the folds of the Liberation Theology movement which, in more recent years, has been evolving in this sense, as well as in the sense of an 'integral ecology.'"

"It is a whole revamping of the Church from an 'Amazonian' point of view, which is nothing else than the culmination of liberation theology," Loredo added. "If they get their way, it would be the most pernicious revolution that has ever happened in the history of the Church."

Archbishop Viganò joins a growing chorus of orthodox clerical voices condemning the working document as a lurch toward heresy.

Last month, Bp. Athanasius Schneider of Astana, Kazakhstan, warned synod architects have no regard for the spiritual welfare of indigenous Amazonian peoples, but are focused only on "the implementation of their own ideological agenda, which is a married clergy in Europe, and then to have it in the whole Latin Church."

Again in July, Cdl. Gerhard Müller, former prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, denounced the synod's working document as "false teaching," saying it represents "a radical U-turn in the hermeneutics of Catholic theology."

Earlier, in a July 11 interview with La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, Müller warned that the synod "is a pretext to change the Church," asserting that Rome was selected as the site for the October gathering in order to "emphasize the beginning of a new Church."

Respected theologian Msgr. Nicola Bux, consulter to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, told Italian blogger Sabino Paciolla late last month that the synod is an attempt to "create another church" and to fashion a "new dogma." Bux added, "What we are facing is an attempt to genetically modify the Church."

In a scathing June 27 critique published by Italian journalist Sandro Magister, dubia co-author Cdl. Walter Brandmüller wrote: "It is to be stated now with insistence that the Instrumentum Laboris contradicts the binding teaching of the Church in decisive points and thus has to be qualified as heretical."

"Inasmuch as even the fact of Divine Revelation is here being questioned, or misunderstood, one also now has to speak, additionally, of apostasy," Brandmüller added.

The Amazon Synod will take place in Rome from Oct. 6-27.

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