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Lexington, Kentucky, Bishop John Stowe speaks with audience members at St. Rita Church in Fairfax March 3. He gave a Lenten talk on Pope Francis’ post-synodal letter on the Amazon region. (Photo by Christina Gray/Catholic San Francisco)
March 9, 2020
Christina Gray
Pope Francis’ post-synodal apostolic letter on the Amazon region links care for creation with Christ’s incarnation, Lexington, Kentucky, Bishop John Stowe said in a Lenten presentation at St. Rita Parish in Fairfax.
“The Lord, who is the first to care for us, teaches us to care for our brothers and sisters and the environment which he daily gives us. This is the first ecology that we need,” Bishop Stowe said in his prepared talk, quoting the pope’s “Querida Amazonia” (Beloved Amazon).
The document was released Feb. 12 and followed the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region held last October in Rome.
Bishop Stowe also cited the papal ecological encyclical “Laudato Si’” in his talk, titled “We Are All in This Together: Interconnectiveness in All Creation.”
Marking the five-year anniversary of the encyclical, the focus of this year’s St. Rita series is “Laudato Si’” and World Peace.”
Some people think of the word cosmic as “new age,” said Bishop Stowe, but Pope Francis calls it an “authentic spirituality.”
“Cosmic ecology recognizes our home is in God,” said Bishop Stowe, who is a Franciscan priest and president of Pax Christi-USA. “God the creator joins creation in the incarnation through his son Jesus. So God becomes part of our home. Jesus bridges the two homes, between this world and the eternal world in which God lives.”
He said Pope Francis draws a contrast between the culture of one who lives in the “right relationship with the creator and the created” and a “cultural milieu of dominance and exploitation that leads to bondage.”
Bishop Stowe read an excerpt from paragraph 71 of “Querida Amazonia” in which Pope Francis says the “primitive” indigenous peoples of the Amazon region have “much to teach us” in this regard.
“They know how to be content with little; they enjoy God’s little gifts without accumulating great possessions; they do not destroy things needlessly; they care for ecosystems and they recognize that the earth, while serving as a generous source of support for their life, also has a maternal dimension that evokes respect and tender love,” the pope states.
Bishop Stowe said Pope Francis’ post-synodal letter “invites us to consider the Christian communities in the Amazon who recognize the incarnation of Christ bridging the world of the creator and the world of creation and showing our interconnectedness, our mutual responsibility.”
“Again, a society that we would consider primitive has something to teach us about living in right relationship,” he said.
Bishop Stowe learned a similar lesson in his first years as a new priest at a parish in El Paso, Texas, on a Pueblo reservation.
“I had some big ideas about liturgy and how we were going to have an ecologically appropriate, but sufficiently large Christmas tree to fill the sanctuary one year,” he said.
A member of the Pueblo community said he knew the Apache in New Mexico “thin the forest” in appropriate ways to sustain it. Father Stowe was offered a legal opportunity to cut a tree. He was about to “take the first swing with the axe” on a beautiful tree when someone from the Apache community stopped him.
“We must first ask permission of the mountain to take this tree,” the man said, after which he said a prayer of respect for the mountain and tree and joined the priest in cutting the tree.
“I never forgot that because, Franciscan that I was and supposedly ecologically conscious, I realized that I was looking at that tree as an object for my purpose,” Bishop Stowe said.
The Apache man had a relationship with the mountain and with the tree. They were eager and willing to share both but only with proper respect.
He said when he told that story to some “religious” people many called the Native Americans “pantheists and pagans” and the prayer offering a “pre-Christian remnant.”
“Sometimes we are so fixated in our categories and the way our faith has been handed on to us that we cannot see the beauty of much deeper and larger spirituality in which Christ himself became incarnate,” he said. “The Apache understood the web, the network of relationships that make up the forest, that make up the mountain in a way that provided a powerful lesson to me.”