The layman leading preparations for the October Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region says that, with the future of the planet at stake, the meeting has never been more urgent

Growing up in Mexico, Mauricio López Oropeza was part of a society that tended to look northwards to the US for a kind of heaven on earth. But when, in 2009, he moved to Ecuador and took a trip to the part of the Amazon basin that sits within its eastern borders, something extraordinary happened.

“I came by bus from the highest mountains with snow and suddenly I entered this beautiful place, where I saw the biggest river, the entrance into the Amazon, and how the flora and fauna were always changing as we went down, down, down,” he says. “The temperature changed radically, and I felt, too, a change within me.”

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