Synod: A Call to Coversion (...to integral ecology)


I'm afraid I'm still catching up from the weekend, and boy - has a lot of stuff happened since Friday!

One quick observation I needed to write down was prompted by the 'unanimous call of the synod groups for the conversion of Catholics to "integral ecology".'
This extraordinary claim comes as one of the leading synod fathers from the Amazon says he has never baptised a single indigenous person and never will!

One has to wonder what exactly he is doing down there! It increasingly appears that the purpose of the synod is to convert Catholics to...whatever it is they do down there, rather than to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them!

Interestingly, this repeats the assertion made by Austen Ivereigh in his latest attempt to cash-in on the Franco-Papacy, subtitled "his struggle to convert the Catholic Church": my initial reaction was, convert it to what? Something where all the abusers are in charge? Where all the money the poor give is embezzled? Where we have rules we say will improve things but totally ignore them?
When I went to Mass on Sunday, it seemed God was speaking directly to this. The collect prayer:
Almighty ever-living God, grant that we may always conform our will to yours and serve your majesty in sincerity of heart. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
The first impetus and message of the Gospel is a call to change, a call to recognise we need to change.

The readings were about crying out to God for justice constantly, even when it seems all the odds are against you.

The first reading is taken from the book of Exodus 17:8-13. In this reading the Israelites are attacked in their journey from Egypt to Canaan by the Amalek tribe who would have annihilated them were it not for Moses's intercession with God. It seemed to be saying to me - don't give up! Keep praying!

In the second reading (from the second letter of Paul to Timothy 3:14, 4:2) St. Paul continues to exhort and encourage his disciple Timothy to be loyal to the Christian faith which he had received from the most trustworthy of sources, St. Paul himself, and the sacred Scripture of the Old Testament. Timothy must continue to preach this "word," this faith, no matter what the obstacles may be.

It then seems God finishes the whole thing off in the Gospel (St. Luke 18:1-8) where our divine Lord teaches us, in parable, the need for perseverance in prayer. This perseverance develops our trust and confidence in God. It helps us to become humble and to realise how weak we are when left to ourselves. It keeps us close to God, as we learn how dependent we are on His generosity. If we only would realise that God is perhaps never closer to us than when we think He is forgetting us! The trials of life, spiritual or temporal, which He allows us to suffer are not obstacles to our spiritual progress but rather stepping-stones without which we could not cross the rivers of life at all. Prayers are answered when we conform ourselves to Christ. If our prayers are not being answered, we need to look at our own lives and consider in what way we need to change.

We may be terrified by what we see at the Amazon Synod - we may be wondering how this could happen, but God is in control, not us. When we pick up the Gospels and read them, it is easy to hear God speaking to us ever more clearly about the very circumstances we are presently living through. So keep faith and keep praying!!

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