15/04/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Easter: the irruption of the unexpected

Christians celebrate at Easter what it means: the passage. In our context, it is the passage from disappointment to the bursting forth of the unexpected. Here the disappointment is the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and the unexpected, his resurrection.

He was someone who went through the world doing good. More than doctrines, he introduced practices always linked to the life of the weakest: he healed the blind, purified lepers, made the lame walk, restored health to many of the sick, satisfied the hunger of multitudes, and even resurrected the dead. We know his tragic end: a plot hatched between religious and political leaders led him to his death on the cross.

Those who followed him, apostles and disciples, were deeply frustrated by the tragic end of the crucifixion. Everyone, except the women who also followed him, began to return to their homes. They were disappointed, because they expected him to bring deliverance to Israel. Such frustration appears clearly in the two disciples at Emmaus, probably a couple who were walking along full of sadness. To someone who joined them on the way, they complain: “We were hoping that it was he who would free Israel, but three days have passed since he was condemned to death” (Luke 24:21).This companion was later revealed to be the resurrected Jesus, recognized in the way he blessed the bread, broke it and distributed it.

The resurrection was outside the horizon of his followers. There was a group in Israel that believed in the resurrection but at the end of time, the resurrection understood as a return to life as it always was is.

But with Jesus the unexpected happened, for in history the unexpected and the improbable can always occur. Only the improbable and unexpected here is of another nature, a really improbable and unexpected event: the resurrection. It must be well understood: it is not the reanimation of a corpse like Lazarus’. Resurrection represents a revolution within evolution. The good end of human history is anticipated. It signifies the unexpected irruption of the new human being, as St. Paul says, the “novissimo Adam”.

This event is really the realization of the unexpected. Teilhard de Chardin whose mystique is all centered on the resurrection as an absolute novelty within the process of evolution called it a “tremendous”, something, therefore, that stirs the whole universe.

This is the fundamental faith of Christians. Without the Resurrection the Christian communities would not exist. They would lose their founding and founding event.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that the two greatest mysteries of the Christian faith are intimately linked to women: the incarnation of the Son of God with Mary (Luke 1:35) and the resurrection with Mary of Magadala (John 20:15). Part of the Church, the hierarchical one, hostage to cultural patriarchalism, has not attributed any theological relevance to this singular fact. It is surely in God’s design and should be welcomed as something culturally innovative.

In these dark times, marked by death and even with the eventual disappearance of the human species by a nuclear cataclysm, faith in the resurrection rips us a future of hope. Our end is not self-destruction within a final tragedy but the full realization of our potentialities through resurrection: the irruption of the new man and woman.

Happy Easter to all those who can believe and also to those who cannot.

Leonardo Boff is a theologian and wrote: The resurrection of Christ and ours in death, Vozes 2012.

Merciless attacks against Pope Francis, “righteous among the nations”

24/03/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Leonardo Boff*

Since the beginning of his pontificate nine years ago, Pope Francis has been receiving furious attacks from traditionalist Christians and white supremacists almost all from the North of the world, the United States and Europe. They even made a plot, involving millions of dollars, to depose him, as if the Church were a company and the Pope its CEO. All in vain. He continues on his way in the spirit of the evangelical beatitudes of the persecuted.

The reasons for this persecution are various: geopolitical reasons, power disputes, another vision of the Church and the care of the Common Home.

I raise my voice in defense of Pope Francis from the periphery of the world, from the Great South. Let us compare the numbers: only 21.5% of Catholics live in Europe, 82% live outside it, 48% in America. We are, therefore, the vast majority. Until the middle of the last century the Catholic Church was a first world Church. Now it is a third and fourth world Church, which, one day, originated in the first world. A geopolitical question arises here. European conservatives, with the exception of notable Catholic organizations of solidarity cooperation, nurture a sovereign disdain for the South, especially for Latin America.

The Church as a great institution was an ally of colonization, an accomplice of indigenous genocide and a participant in slavery. A colonial Church was implanted here, a mirror of the European Church. But for more than 500 years, despite the persistence of the mirror Church, there has been an ecclesiogenesis, the genesis of another way of being church, a church, no longer mirror but source:

it was incarnated in the local indigenous-black-mestizo and immigrant culture of peoples from 60 different countries. From this amalgam, its style of worshipping God and celebrating, of organizing its social pastoral care alongside the oppressed struggling for their liberation, was born. It projected a theology appropriate to its liberating and popular practice. It has its prophets, confessors, theologians, saints, and many martyrs, among them the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero.

This type of Church is fundamentally composed of basic ecclesial communities, where the dimension of communion of equals is lived, all brothers and sisters, with their lay coordinators, men and women, with priests inserted among the people and bishops, never with their backs to the people as ecclesiastical authorities, but as shepherds at their side, with the “smell of sheep”, with the mission of being the “defenders et advocati pauperum” as it was said in the primitive Church. Popes and doctrinal authorities of the Vatican tried to curtail and even condemn such a way of being Church, not infrequently with the argument that they are not Church because they do not see in them the hierarchical character and the Roman style.

This threat lasted for many years until, finally, the figure of Pope Francis burst in. He came from the soup of this new ecclesial culture, well expressed by the non-exclusive preferential option for the poor and by the various strands of liberation theology that accompany it. He gave legitimacy to this way of living the Christian faith, especially in situations of great oppression.

But what is most scandalizing to traditionalist Christians is his style of exercising the ministry of unity in the Church. He no longer presents himself as the classic pontiff, dressed in pagan symbols borrowed from the Roman emperors, especially the famous “mozzeta”, that little banking cap full of symbols of the absolute power of the emperor and the pope. Francis quickly got rid of it and wore a simple white “mozzeta”, like that of the great prophet of Brazil, dom Helder Câmara, and his iron cross without any jewels.

He refused to live in a pontifical palace, which would have made St. Francis rise from the grave to take him where he chose: in a simple guest house, Santa Marta. There he enters the line to be served and eats together with everyone else. With humor we can say that this way it is more difficult to poison him. He does not wear Prada, but his old and worn-out shoes. In the pontifical yearbook in which a whole page is used with the honorific titles of the Popes, he simply renounced them all and wrote only Franciscus, pontifex.

In one of his first pronouncements he clearly stated that he was not going to preside over the Church with canon law but with love and tenderness. Countless times he repeated that he wanted a poor Church and a Church of the poor.

The whole great problem of the Church-great-institution lies, since the emperors Constantine and Theodosius, in the assumption of political power, transformed into sacred power (sacra potestas). This process reached its culmination with Pope Gregory VII (1075) with his bull Dictatus Papae, which well translated is the “Dictatorship of the Pope“. As the great ecclesiologist Jean-Yves Congar says,, this Pope consolidated the most decisive change in the Church that created so many problems and from which it has never been freed: the centralized, authoritarian and even despotic exercise of power. In the 27 propositions of the Bull, the Pope is considered the absolute lord of the Church, the sole and supreme lord of the world, becoming the supreme authority in the spiritual and temporal realms. This has never been denied.

It is enough to read Canon 331 in which it is said that “the Pastor of the universal Church has ordinary, supreme, full, immediate and universal power”. This is unheard of: if we cross out the term Pastor of the universal Church and put in God, it works perfectly. Who among humans, if not God, can attribute to himself such a concentration of power? It is significant that in the history of the Popes there has been a crescendo in the pharaohism of power: from successor of Peter, the Popes came to consider themselves representatives of Christ. And as if that were not enough, representatives of God, being even called deus minor in terra.

Here the Greek hybris is realized and what Thomas Hobbes states in his Leviathan: “I point out, as a general tendency of all men, a perpetual and restless desire for power and more power, which only ceases with death. The reason for this lies in the fact that power cannot be secured except by seeking still more power.” This, then, has been the trajectory of the Catholic Church in relation to power, which persists to this day, a source of polemics with the other Christian Churches and of extreme difficulty in assuming the humanistic values of modernity.

It is light years away from the vision of Jesus who wanted a power-service (hierodulia) and not a power-hierarchy (hierarchy).

Pope Francis is moving away from all this, which causes indignation to conservatives and reactionaries, clearly expressed in the book of 45 authors of October 2021: From Benedict’s Peace to Francis’s War organized by Peter A. Kwasniewski. We would turn it around like this: From Benedict’s Peace of Pedophiles (covered up by him) to Francis’ War on Pedophiles (condemned by him). It is known that a Munich court found evidence to incriminate Pope Benedict XVI for his leniency with pedophile priests.

There is a problem of ecclesiastical geopolitics: the traditionalists reject a Pope who comes “from the end of the world”, who brings to the center of power of the Vatican another style, closer to the grotto of Bethlehem than to the palaces of the emperors. If Jesus appeared to the Pope on his walk through the Vatican gardens, he would surely say to him: “Peter, on these palatial stones I would never build my Church”. This contradiction is lived by Pope Francis, because he renounced the palatial and imperial style.

There is, in fact, a clash of religious geopolitics, between the Center, which has lost hegemony in number and influence but retains the habits of authoritarian exercise of power, and the Periphery, with a numerical majority of Catholics, with new churches, with new styles of living the faith and in permanent dialogue with the world, especially with the condemned of the Earth, which always has a word to say about the wounds that bleed in the body of the Crucified One, present in the impoverished and oppressed.

Perhaps what most bothers Christians anchored in the past is the Pope’s vision of the Church. Not a castle Church, closed in on herself, in her values and doctrines, but a “field hospital” Church always “going out to the existential peripheries”. She welcomes everyone without asking about their creed or their moral situation. It is enough that they are human beings in search of meaning in life and suffering from the adversities of this globalized, unjust, cruel and merciless world. He directly condemns the system that gives centrality to money at the cost of human lives and at the cost of nature.

He has held several world meetings with popular movements. In the last one, the fourth, he explicitly said: “This system (capitalist), with its implacable logic, escapes human domination; it is necessary to work for more justice and to cancel this system of death”. In Fratelli tutti he condemns it forcefully.

He is guided by what is one of the great contributions of Latin American theology: the centrality of the historical Jesus, poor, full of tenderness for those who suffer, always at the side of the poor and marginalized. The Pope respects dogmas and doctrines, but it is not through them that he reaches the hearts of the people.

For him, Jesus came to teach how to live: total trust in God-Abba, to live unconditional love, solidarity, compassion for the fallen on the roads, care for the Created, goods that constitute the content of the central message of Jesus: the Kingdom of God. He tirelessly preaches the boundless mercy by which God saves his children and the Kingdom of God. He tirelessly preaches the boundless mercy by which God saves his sons and daughters, for he cannot lose any of them, the fruits of his love, “for he is the passionate lover of life” (Wis 11:26).

That is why he affirms that “no matter how much someone is wounded by evil, he is never condemned on this earth to remain forever separated from God”. In other words: condemnation is only for this time.

He calls on all pastors to exercise the pastoral care of tenderness and unconditional love, as summarized by a popular leader of a grassroots community: “the soul has no border, no life is foreign”. Like few others in the world, he has committed himself to the migrants coming from Africa and the Middle East and now from Ukraine. He regrets that we moderns have lost the ability to cry, to feel the pain of others and, as a Good Samaritan, to help them in their abandonment.

His most important work shows concern for the future of Mother Earth’s life. Laudato Sì expresses its true meaning in its subtitle: “On Care for the Common Home”. It elaborates not a green ecology, but an integral ecology that embraces the environment, society, politics, culture, daily life and the world of the spirit. It assumes the most reliable contributions of the Earth and life sciences, especially quantum physics and the new cosmology, the fact that “everything is related to everything and unites us with affection to Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother River and Mother Earth” as it poetically says in Laudato Sì.

The category of care and collective co-responsibility acquire complete centrality to the point of saying in Fratelli tutti that “we are in the same boat: either we all save ourselves or no one is saved”.

We Latin Americans are deeply grateful to him for having convoked the Dear Amazon Synod to defend this immense biome of interest for the whole Earth and how the Church is incarnated in that vast region that covers nine countries.

Great names in world ecology affirmed: with this contribution Pope Francis puts himself at the forefront of the contemporary ecological discussion.

Almost in despair, but still full of hope, he proposes a way of salvation: universal fraternity and social love as the structuring axes of a biosociety in function of which politics, economy and all human efforts are based. We do not have much time nor enough accumulated wisdom, but this is the dream and the real alternative to avoid a path of no return.

The Pope walking alone through St. Peter’s Square in the pouring rain, in times of pandemic, will remain an indelible image and a symbol of his mission as a Pastor who cares and prays for the destiny of humanity.

Perhaps one of the final phrases of Laudato Sì reveals all his optimism and hope against all hope: “Let us walk singing. May our struggles and our concern for this planet not rob us of the joy of hope.”

They must be enemies of their own humanity who mercilessly condemn the very humanitarian attitudes of Pope Francis, in the name of a sterile Christianity, turned into a fossil of the past, a vessel of dead waters. The fierce attacks on him can be anything but Christian and evangelical.

They, especially the cardinals and bishops who participated in the aforementioned book, are schismatic and in the ancient sense, heretical, for lacerating the fabric of the ecclesial community. Pope Francis bears it imbued with the humility of St. Francis of Assisi and the values of the historical Jesus. For this reason he well deserves the title of “righteous among the nations”.

*Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian theologian and has written Francis of Assisi and Francis of Rome, Rio de Janeiro 2015.

The Insanity of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Russia and USA

05/03/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The book of Revelation, which narrates the final clashes of our history, between the forces of death and those of life, paints us a horse of fire that symbolizes war: “the rider was given to banish the peace of the earth so that men behead each other”(6,4). The war between Russia and Crimea and the order of the Russian president to keep nuclear weapons on high alert, provoke us to the action of the fire horse, the beheading of humanity, worth say, a human Armageddon.

The severe sanctions imposed by NATO and the USA on the Russian Federation can lead to the collapse of its entire economy. In the face of this national disaster, the possibility that the Russian leader does not accept defeat as if Napoleon (1812) or Hitler (1942) had taken the country, which they failed to do. Then he would carry out the threats and launch a nuclear strike. Only Russia’s arsenal can destroy, several times, all life on the planet. And a strike can damage the entire biosphere without which our life could not survive.

Behind this Russia/Ukraine confrontation hide powerful forces in dispute for world hegemony: Russia, allied with China and the USA. The strategy of the latter is more or less known, guided by two main ideas: “one world and one empire” (the USA), guaranteed by full-spectrum dominance: domination in all fields with 800 military bases distributed around the world, but also with economic, ideological and cultural domination.

Such complete domination would underlie the USA’s claim to be “exceptional”, to be “the indispensable and necessary nation”, the “anchor of global security” or the “only truly world power”. In this imperial will, NATO, behind which the USA stands, expanded to the limits of Russia. All that was needed was the insertion of Ukraine to close the siege. Missiles placed on the Ukrainian border would reach Moscow in minutes.

Hence Russia’s demand for Ukraine to remain neutral, otherwise it would be invaded. This is what happened with the perversities that every war produces. No war is justifiable because it kills human lives and goes against the meaning of things, which is the tendency to persist in existence.

China, in turn, disputes world hegemony not through military means, even in alliance with Russia, but through economic means with its great projects such as the Silk Road. In this field it is surpassing the USA and would reach world hegemony even with a certain ethical ideal, that of creating “a community of common destiny shared by all humanity, with societies sufficiently supplied”.

But I don’t want to prolong this warlike perspective, truly insane to the point of being suicidal. But this confrontation of powers reveals the unawareness of the actors on the screen about the real risks to the planet that, even without nuclear weapons, could endanger human life. It must be said that all arsenals of weapons of mass destruction have proven to be totally useless and ridiculous in the face of a tiny virus like Covid-19.

This war reveals that those responsible for human destiny have not learned the basic lesson of Covid-19. It has not respected national sovereignties and national boundaries, it has affected the entire planet. The epidemic calls for the establishment of global governance in the face of a global problem. The challenge goes beyond national borders, it is to build the Common Home.

They have not realized that the big problem is global warming. We are already in it, since the fatal events of flooding entire regions, typhoons, and shortage of fresh water are visible. We only have 9 years to avoid a situation of no return. If by 2030 we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of heat, we will be unable to control it and will be heading towards a collapse of the Earth-system and the life-systems.

We have reached the limits of Earth’s sustainability (Earth Overshoo) data show that by September 22, 2020, the non-renewable resources necessary for life will be exhausted.The consumerism that persists demands of Earth what she can no longer give.In response, she sends us deadly viruses, increases warming, destabilizes climates, and decimates thousands of living beings.

Overpopulation associated with a disastrous social inequality, with the vast majority of humanity living in poverty and misery, when 1% of them control 90% of the wealth and essential goods and services, can lead to conflicts with countless victims and the devastation of entire ecosystems.

These are the problems,among others,that should concern the heads of state,the CEOs of large corporations and the citizens,because they directly jeopardize the future of all humanity. In the face of this global risk, a war for zones of influence and obsolete sovereignties is ridiculous.

What gives us hope are those anonymous “Noahs” that are sprouting everywhere, from below, building their saving arks through production that respects the limits of nature, through agro-ecology, through communities of solidarity, through participatory socio-ecological democracies, working from their own territories. They have the strength of the seed of the new, and with a new mind (the Earth as Gaia) and a new heart (a bond of affection and care for nature) they guarantee a new future with the awareness of universal responsibility and global interdependence. Their war is against hunger and the production of death, and their struggle is for justice for all, promotion of life, and defense of the weakest and most destitute.

They are not alone. There are powerful forces with another vision of necessary development and that do not subscribe to capitalist logic but produce in harmony with nature that are bearers of hope for another necessary world.

That is what must be. And what should be, has intrinsically an invincible force.

Leonardo Boff is an eco-theologian, philosopher, and has written Inhabiting the Earth: what is the way to universal brotherhood? Vozes 2021.

Reality can be worse than we think

13/02/2022 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We are living through dramatic moments in human history. We spent the last 10,000 years, the Holocene era, with relative calm, with an average climate of 15 degrees Celsius. Everything began to change with the industrial and energy revolution in the 18th century. The concentration of CO2, the main responsible for climatic disturbances, began to skyrocket.

n 1950 it reached 300 ppm, in 2015 it exceeded 400 ppm and is currently approaching 420 ppm. Experts say that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, increased by the entry of methane with the thawing of the polar ice caps and permafrost (icy regions that go from Canada to the ends of Siberia), being 80 times more harmful than CO2, is already the biggest, at least, of the last 3 million years.

It is seriously feared that pests frozen for thousands of years, once thawed, can affect our immune system that would not be immune to them, decimating many lives. Warming continues to increase, causing sea level rise, acidification of ocean waters, erosion of biodiversity, air and soil contamination, deforestation, the occurrence of extreme events and the intrusion of a wide range of harmful viruses to human life, like Covid-19.

The last COP26 in Glasgow in 2021 raised the alarm: if we do nothing from now on, we will slowly reach 2030 at 1.5 degrees Celsius or more. Then there would be major socio-ecological catastrophes. There is talk of a “planetary emergency” and even an “ecological Armageddon” that would devastate much of life as we know it. It would be a consequence of the new geological era of the Anthropocene, perhaps, of the Necrocene itself. Who cares about this worrying and ominous scenario? Almost nobody.

Unconsciousness is lived like in Noah’s time. As no one knows when or how the “flood” will come, everyone is in business as usual, yearning for a return to the old normality, exactly the one that is producing the global tragedy of the coronavirus. Even more serious is the realization that there is no collective will, either in the heads of state or in world society, to warn of the serious consequences for our lives, for the life of nature and for the destiny of our civilization.

The climate issue does not enter the radar of public policies or in the last places. However, we believe that, in a few years, it will be the issue of issues, when, due to the excess of heat, large regions will become uninhabitable, crops will be frustrated and millions of climatic and hungry migrants will jeopardize the stability of nations. Few are the prophets who cry out in the desert being considered apocalyptic and knights of the sad news.

But those who have overcome this blindness feel the ethical and moral duty to awaken consciences and prepare humanity for the worst. Because of the irresponsibility of the CEOs of large corporations, the inertia of the heads of state, the neglect of society, the various knowledges and movements (with the exception of some such as Greenpeace, the MST, Greta Thunberg and others) in raising a collective conscience, we may know a reality worse than we imagine.

The events that we are suffering worldwide with the coronavirus, the great floods in Bahia, Minas Gerais, Tocantins, alongside the severe droughts in the south of the country, not to mention the extreme events in the USA, Europe and the Asian tsunami, could pull us out of alienation and show us, really, that the future that awaits us could be worse than we thought. Do we have a chance to delay the end of the world, in the expression of indigenous leadership, Ailton Krenak?

We can. Let’s do a mental exercise about our time within the great cosmogenic process. If we reduce the age of the universe (13.7 billion years) to one year, the first singularity, the Big Bang, would have occurred on January 1st. Life only on October 2nd. Homo sapiens, our ancestor, on December 31 at 11:53 am. Our documented history, in the last ten seconds before midnight. It is us? In a fraction of a second before midnight (Calculations by physicist and cosmologist Brian Swimme).

We are almost nothing. However, it is through us that the Earth becomes aware and with our eyes sees the entire universe. Consider the coronavirus: so tiny that it is invisible to the naked eye: and what havoc it is doing to humanity. Similarly we are: we are almost a zero in the face of the Infinite. But we carry the consciousness and intelligence of the Whole that is made known to us.

Surely, no matter how irresponsible we are, we are important to the known universe and we believe that we will not disappear from the face of the Earth. We will live and billiard. For this, two things are urgent: the first, to create a deep affective bond with nature and the Earth. Love them and take care of them. Second, we need to live in intimate communion with them. Communion is more than a fundamental theological concept. It is a fact of the deepest reality: everything is in communion with everything because everyone is inter-retro-related. Internalizing this communion, we can feel like brothers and sisters of all things in the style of Saint Francis of Assisi.

And so we will behave. This behavior is required of us now. He will be able to save life and also save us all: affection and communion.

Leonardo Boff wrote Inhabiting the Earth: which way to universal fraternity, Voices, 2022; Caring for the Earth-saving life: how to escape the end of the world, Record 2010.