The Archbishop of Armagh said Thursday that the pope’s apostolic exhortation on the Amazon was foremost a call to preserve the region and that a focus on its failure to address the priestly ordination of married men is undue.
“I understand there has been disappointment over the airwaves yesterday, and a lot of people feeling that perhaps this was a moment at which Pope Francis was going to express his views on the ordination of married men as priests,” Archbishop Eamon Martin said Feb. 13 to the Irish public broadcaster RTE.
“But I think Pope Francis would be disappointed if this is the issue that we’re all talking about today, because his exhortation is a huge cry from the Amazon and a cry from the heart to protect that region that is being cruelly destroyed by, I suppose, the exploitation of its resources, the destruction of its natural beauty and its life.”
“He says, ‘listen, the whole world has a responsibility to try and preserve the equilibrium of the planet, which so much depends on the health of the Amazon and the ecosystems there’; so his whole exhortation is really in line with his thinking from a few years ago, in his famous encyclical Laudato si’; it’s really a call for the protection of the earth.”
While Pope Francis was expected to focus in Querida Amazonia on a proposal to ordain married priests in the Amazon region, the pope instead emphasized the importance of collaboration in apostolic ministry by Catholics in various states of life.
Pressed on the topic, Archbishop Martin said that a call to consider the priestly ordination of married men was made in one of the 120 paragraphs of the Amazon synod’s final document, “so it wasn’t even at the Amazon synod the main theme of the synod, it was on this other issue I’ve been speaking to you about, the corruption, exploitation of the Amazon, the destruction of the indigenous peoples there, their displacement, oppression. These are the issues that he bishops at the Amazonian synod in October were most passionate about.” CNA
