54 The EconomistOctober 26th 2019
1A
s the sunsets over Nazareth, a village
on the banks of the Amazon river in the
Colombian rainforest, a Jesuit priest peers
out at a small congregation, made up of
members of the indigenous Tikuna people.
They are sitting on rickety benches around
the edges of a cement church. “Why is
everyone so far away?” asks Father Valério
Paulo Sartor, stepping down from the altar
to say mass from the aisle. “If you won’t
come to me, I’ll come to you.”
Some 6,000 miles away in Rome, bish-
ops, indigenous leaders and ngorepresen-
tatives from the Amazon basin, together
with Vatican prelates, are discussing how
the Catholic church can do just that. In a
three-week synod that ends on October
27th, they hope to find new ways for the
church to work with local communities to
tackle the crises facing the region—and Ca-
tholicism—in a part of the world where the
church is overstretched, understaffed, yet
still remarkably influential.
The synod represents the biggest step
yet towards recognising something manyCatholics in the West, especially church
leaders, have been reluctant to acknowl-
edge: just as economic and diplomatic
power in the secular world is slipping away
from the North Atlantic region, a similar
process is taking place in Catholicism. In
the secular world, the shift is to Asia. With-
in the Catholic church it is towards not
only Asia, but Africa and Latin America,
too. That is forcing the church to consider
how far it is willing to adapt to the practices
and beliefs of cultures with their own spiri-
tual traditions. The synod has added to
fears of a new schism within the church.
Catholicism’s three biggest national
churches are those of Brazil, Mexico and
the Philippines. It has become a religion
largely of the poor world, but with a leader-
ship that is still predominantly rooted in
the rich one. Around 40% of baptised Cath-
olics are from North America, Europe, Aus-
tralasia and Japan, yet those regions pro-
vide the church with 57% of its cardinals.
Italy, with 4% of the world’s Catholic popu-
lation, is the birthplace of almost one infive of the “princes of the church”.
Pope Francis, who is the first Latin
American pontiff, has tried to rebalance
things. He joked on the night of his election
in 2013 that his fellow cardinals had gone
“almost to the ends of the Earth” to find
him. He has continued their quest. More
than half the cardinals he has created come
from the developing world. His long-await-
ed reform of the administration of the
Catholic church may take the process fur-
ther by reducing the scope of the Vatican
and transferring some of its departments—
and power—to other parts of the world.
That shift has been exacerbated by the
growing threat posed by climate change.
The pope has long argued that care for the
environment is inseparable from the fight
against global inequality. He called the
synod, the first to be dedicated to a single
region, partly because of the Amazon’s cru-
cial role as a buffer against climate change.
Its basin contains 40% of Earth’s rainfor-
ests and serves as a carbon sink, mitigating
warming. But rising deforestation, on the
pretext of development, threatens the sus-
tainability of the ecosystem. The insouci-
ance of regional governments, especially
Brazil’s, puts them on a collision course
with the church.
Leaders from half a dozen ethnic groups
gathered recently in Atalaia do Norte, a
town outside an indigenous territory the
size of Austria, to discuss a rise in inva-
sions by illegal miners and loggers em-The Roman Catholic churchThe beautiful south
ATALAIA DO NORTE, BRAZIL; NAZARETH, COLOMBIA; AND VATICAN CITY
The drift of power in the church away from the north towards the south is
heightening tensions within the institutionInternational