Amazon Synod Roster Packed with Leftists
Environmentalists, liberation theologians, LGBT advocates dominate participant list.
VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) – The Amazon Synod’s leftist ideological bent is coming into sharper focus.
On Saturday, the Vatican released its official roster of synod participants — a list heavy with leading Church liberals.
Pope Francis will serve as synod president, while Cdl. Lorenzo Baldisseri will serve as secretary general.
Baldisseri has willfully cooperated with the Vatican’s homosexual network. He used his position as lead organizer of the 2014 and 2015 Synods on the Family to push Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried, as well as liberalization of Church teaching on homosexuality.
During the 2015 gathering, Baldisseri personally intervened to block Cdl. Raymond Burke and other faithful cardinals from distributing Remaining in the Truth of Christ, a book reiterating Church teaching on marriage on the grounds that they would “interfere with the synod.”
Baldisseri was also responsible for inserting the term “LGBT” into the working document for the 2018 Youth Synod — an unprecedented concession to the pro-gay movement.
He also approved publication of the document, which suggested that Church teaching on contraception, abortion and homosexuality are up for debate and sought to legitimize young Catholics who choose to live homosexual lifestyles while still wanting “to be close to the Church.”
Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, archbishop emeritus of Sao Paulo and president of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM), will serve as relator general. As early as 2014, Hummes was pushing the idea of married priests as a solution to the shortage of clerics in the Amazon region.
Cardinal Pedro Ricardo Barreto Jimeno, archbishop of Huancayo in Peru and REPAM vice president, will serve as one of three president delegates. Jimeno is an avowed environmentalist.
During a 2005 synod, he asserted that the bread and wine offered during Mass are compromised if the land that produces them is poorly cared for.
“I said that if we offer bread from land that’s contaminated, we are offering God a contaminated fruit. And the same for the wine,” he recalled in a Crux interview earlier this year.
Attendee Cdl. Pietro Parolin, secretary of state for the Holy See, is a principal architect of the September 2018 Vatican accord with China in which the Holy See recognized seven “bishops” of the Communist-backed “patriotic” Catholic Church. The agreement has been slammed by Cdl. Joseph Zen as a betrayal of faithful Chinese Catholics and warned it could be “the death of the true Faith in China.”
Parolin is also accused of covering up clerical sex abuse.
Earlier this year, Vatican whistleblower Abp. Carlo Maria Viganò alleged Parolin “knows the names of a number of priests in the Curia who are sexually unchaste, violating the laws of God that they solemnly committed themselves to teach and practice, and he continues to look the other way.”
Parolin has tried — unsuccessfully — to silence faithful Catholic opposition. Under his direction, in 2017, the Vatican hired a pro-gay law firm to try to shut down conservative Spanish website InfoVaticana after it voiced alarm over the growing homosexual current in the Church.
Synod member Cdl. Kevin Farrell, prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life, also has connections to McCarrick.
Though sharing a house with McCarrick for years, Farrell denied any knowledge of the disgraced ex-cardinal’s crimes: “I was shocked, overwhelmed; I never heard any of this before, the six years I was there with him. And never, no indication, none whatsoever, nobody ever talked to me about that,” he insisted after the abuse revelations came to light. “So, I really don’t have any knowledge or anything to add to about more than that.”
Farrell is also accused of minimizing clerical sex abuse during his time as bishop of Dallas from 2007–2016. In one case, after failing to report abuse, Farrell allegedly told a victim that his abuse at the hands of an older priest was “consensual.”
Synod member Cdl. Reinhard Marx, head of the German Bishops’ Conference, is well-known for promoting heterodoxy — instituting Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried in Germany, pushing for admission of Protestants to the Eucharist and advocating for married priests.
In recent weeks, Marx has led the Church in Germany to the edge of schism, insisting on pressing forward with a controversial “Synodal Assembly” to re-examine Church teaching on clerical celibacy, women’s ordination and sexual morality.
Synod member Cdl. Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, has voiced support for ordaining women to the diaconate and praised active gay unions.
“[T]hey share their joys and sufferings, they help one another,” Schönborn said in his defense of “stable unions” for gay couples. “It must be recognized that this person took an important step for his own good and the good of others.”
The cardinal also reinstated an active homosexual to an Austrian parish council after he was removed by a faithful priest for causing scandal.
Synod member Abp. Vincenzo Paglia, head of the Pontifical Academy for Life, made headlines in 2017 for admitting a pro-abortion Protestant philosopher to the pro-life institute. In what has been described as a “coup” in July, Paglia dismissed a raft of leading pro-life theologians from leadership at the academy.
Representing the United States at the Oct. 6–27 synod is Cdl. Sean O’Malley of Boston and Bp. Robert McElroy of San Diego.
Cardinal O’Malley has been accused of turning a blind eye to the Church’s gay subculture.
In July 2018, The New York Times revealed that O’Malley had been contacted as early as 2015 about Theodore McCarrick’s abuse of seminarians but did nothing to expose the serial homosexual predator.
In the wake of that allegation, an ex-seminarian accused O’Malley of whitewashing an investigation into rampant homosexual activity at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts.
Bishop McElroy, a leading climate change apologist, has distinguished himself as one of the most pro-LGBT prelates in the United States.
The bishop has described faithful Catholics as a “cancer” in the Church, and in October 2018, McElroy made headlines by ejecting young orthodox Catholics out of a series of “listening sessions” after they questioned him about homosexuality in his clerical ranks.
Like O’Malley, McElroy was also made aware of McCarrick’s sexual predation of young men but did nothing to stop it. In 2016, clerical sex abuse expert Richard Sipe notified McElroy that he had personally interviewed 12 seminarians and young priests who reported being abused by McCarrick. McElroy did not respond to Sipe’s outreach.
Other prominent leftists featured on the synod’s roster include Cardinal-elect Michael Czerny, undersecretary of the Migrant and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, and Cardinal-elect Jean-Claude Hollerich, archbishop of Luxembourg and president of the Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union, both of whom favor open-door migration policies, as well as Cdl. Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Cdl. Oswald Gracias, archbishop of Bombay, both of whom openly back the LGBT agenda.
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