Category: Church

Pope Francis has published his apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia. I will post some of the highlights from the document in which Pope Francis focuses on four dreams.

Cultural Dream

I dream of an Amazon region that can preserve its distinctive cultural riches, where the beauty of our humanity shines forth in so many varied ways. (7)

4. “Here I would like to point out that ‘a consumerist vision of human beings, encouraged by the mechanisms of today’s globalized economy, has a leveling effect on cultures, diminishing the immense variety which is the heritage of all humanity’. This especially affects young people, for it has a tendency to ‘blur what is distinctive about their origins and backgrounds, and turn them into a new line of malleable goods.’” (33)

Pope Francis has published his apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia. I will post some of the highlights from the document in which Pope Francis focuses on four dreams.

Social Dream

I dream of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters, where their voices can be heard and their dignity advanced. (7)

3. “The businesses, national or international, which harm the Amazon and fail to respect the right of the original peoples to the land and its boundaries, and to self-determination and prior consent, should be called for what they are: injustice and crime.”(14)

Pope Francis has published his apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia. I will post some of the highlights from the document in which Pope Francis focuses on four dreams.

Social Dream

I dream of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters, where their voices can be heard and their dignity advanced. (7)

2. “The Amazon region has been presented as an enormous empty space to be filled, a source of raw resources to be developed, a wild expanse to be domesticated. None of this recognizes the rights of the original peoples; it simply ignores them as if they did not exist, or acts as if the lands on which they live do not belong to them.” (12)

Pope Francis has published his apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia. I will post some of the highlights from the document in which Pope Francis focuses on four dreams.

Social Dream

I dream of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters, where their voices can be heard and their dignity advanced. (7)

1. “We do not need an environmentalism ‘that is concerned for the biome but ignores the Amazonian peoples.’” (8)

Today I went to the funeral of a colleague from the Philippines who died here. There aren’t many funerals in the Catholic churches in Cambodia because there aren’t many Catholics and because the Cambodian Catholics are mostly quite young and the foreign Catholics tend to be younger or robust middle age also. We don’t have a significant population of older foreigners living here. This was only the second or third time in twenty years that I have been at an actual funeral in a church with the body present. Most of the time I have funerals at the Buddhist wats (pagodas) where the body is to be cremated or else there is a simple ceremony at the morgue before a body is shipped to its home country for burial.

The Philippines Embassy in Phnom Penh was trying to recreate the spirit of the Simbang Gabi pre-Christmas devotions celebrated on the nine days before Christmas in the Philippines but limited it to three nights. The first two nights were Catholic masses but the third night was an ecumenical service with people attending from five Christian churches.