After the denunciation of the working document for the forthcoming Synod on the Amazon by Cardinal Walter Brandmüller, three new criticisms have been drawn up in July. The third comes from Bishop Nicola Bux, theologian and former consultant to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
“Jesus Christ came to bring God to earth, so that man might find the way to heaven: that is why he founded the Church,” the Italian Monsignor said. “Instead, today’s clerics take care of the earth as if it were man’s permanent and lasting home. What is the symptom? They do not speak of the soul and therefore of its salvation.” The Church is considered by them “as a sociological phenomenon; thus it must deal with economics, ecology and politics,” he added.
On the subject of inculturation extoled in the working document, Bishop Bux says that “it is presented in an inverted way: the intention is to return the Church in the Amazon to animism and spiritualism, making it withdraw from the Word that was announced to it through evangelization.” Drawing out the expression Cardinal Brandmüller made in his June 27 analysis, “a natural religion with a Christian mask,” Bishop Bux went on to say, “We are faced with the attempt to genetically modify the Church, calling into question the faith and unity of the Roman rite that expresses it.”
The Italian theologian also said that “he finds it ‘incredible’ that the Amazon is being considered as a ‘theological place,’ i.e. a special source of revelation. Seconding Cardinal Walter Brandmüller’s critique…Msgr. Bux said that by calling into question divine Revelation, the document ‘detaches itself from the truth of the Catholic faith,’ and amounts to ‘apostasy.’”
In passing, he noted that “Instrumentum laboris has received the enthusiastic approval — and perhaps the advice — of Leonard Boff, a former Franciscan priest, a historical representative of liberation theology who, in the 1970s, was reprimanded by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.”
Bishop Bux concluded the interview stating, “There is no liberation without conversion to Christ. The Instrumentum Laboris never mentions this term, which is at the beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but, as cardinals, priests, and faithful have already observed, by contradicting on decisive points the binding teaching of the Church—that is, to which every true Catholic is bound—it can be qualified as heretical. It’s an attack against the foundations of the faith, which reduces the Catholic religion to pure subjectivism. It almost seems that it is Jesus Christ who must convert to the new Amazonian divinity.”
Catholicism Pure & Simple 