Costa noted the advisory nature of the document in his comments, stating that the text is “entrusted to the last discernment of the pope. He will then receive it and he will underline in an official way the next steps.”
The work of the synod participants in the last several weeks has been “profound listening,” not looking for “the minority, the majority” on certain issues, he said, adding that “sure, numbers count. However, in all of this… everyone has contributed in an original way to construct, to put down these ‘stones’ to make a shared path.”
Costa said the period of the drafting and revising of the Amazon synod’s final text is, therefore, “a very delicate phase, meriting also a certain respect.” The preceding steps having taken place, “now, with faith, we await the last step,” he said.
A team chaired by the synod’s Relator General, Cardinal Claudio Hummes (a Brazilian, and prefect emeritus of the Congregation for the Clergy), is principally responsible for writing the final report, according to Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, who is a member of the final report drafting committee.
At the same press conference, Bishop Gilberto Alfredo Vizcarra Mori, Vicar Apostolic of Jaén in Peru, spoke about an experience he had before the synod. He spent one month with an indigenous community in part of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest as preparation, he said.
Vizcarra said that he went there to “walk with them in the middle of the jungle, to talk to these communities, to live not as someone who will teach because you can’t teach there, you have to depend on them to go into the jungle and discover what it is to live in the jungle.”
The bishop added that after that experience of a month with native people, he is “surprised at how far this world is from us, how difficult it is to be able to understand those categories that we use to define this world [of the Amazon].”
“Biome” is just a concept to most people, he said, but “being there and living in the jungle allows us to understand what this is.”
“The natives feel like themselves as part of a whole life that is composed of so much diversity, of such wonder,” Vizcarra explained, “and that then it is a gift for them and therefore they do not consider themselves a part of this world, of this biome, not as owners or possessors, but as living in the Amazon, being part of this Amazon.”
The synod, he said, should make Catholics better understand the relationship of human beings with the world around them.
