Pope asks rainforest bishop to help on encyclical

Pope Francis has invited Erwin Kräutler, Bishop of Xingu in the Brazilian rainforest, to assist him with his next encyclical on the environment, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt. Bishop Kräutler, who met with the Pope on 4 April, has been a leading advocate for the rights of Brazil’s indigenous peoples for more than 30 years, and is president of the Church’s Indigenous Missionary Council.

The Pope had wanted first-hand information concerning the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest and the threat to the local indigenous population, Bishop Kräutler told the Austrian daily Salzburger Nachrichten. “I first of all informed the Pope that the constitutional rights of the indigenous peoples in Brazil were  once again massively being called into question,” Bishop Kräutler said. He added that he had given the Pope a thick dossier on the more than 90 indigenous peoples who live without contact with the surrounding population and who are particularly under threat as there is no official documentation on their very existence. 

While in Rome, Bishop Kräutler also spent several hours with the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Peter Turkson.

“Cardinal Turkson is preparing a preliminary paper for the papal encyclical [on the environment]. I urgently asked him to include the concerns of the indigenous peoples in Brazil and the rainforest in this preliminary text. The cardinal has given me his private email address and asked me to send him the relevant data,” Bishop Kräutler said. 

n The Brazilian Church has acknowledged it played a role in backing the military junta that governed from 1964 to 1985, writes Jon Stibbs. The country is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the junta. A Brazilian bishops’ conference document, “For New Times, with Freedom and Democracy”, released on 1 April, accepts that some of the Church supported the overthrow of leftist President João Goulart in a military coup on the night of 31 March 1964. The bishops emphasised the Church became an outspoken critic of the regime.