Pedro Walpole SJ
COP as a spiritual experience sounds like a contradiction in action and in being. For many, it will begin to happen on the way home with so much tiredness, along with transit flights for most. There is much acceptance that this is the way things are and is a realization also of self-limitations. Perhaps there is a sadness in what was not achieved or expected.
We are now called home to find further ways to live out this experience with our people for the coming year. Who do I come home to? Beyond my family and job, who is my community where I am welcome? Where is time inclusive of all around?
Leaving COP30 – this rushed time and space – we must believe the work lives on in Belém. The whole of Brazil and Amazonia as local society is shaken anew by this invasion, disturbed by the contradictions and absurdities. The dialogue begins anew with recognition of the differences, the state of the land and life of the people, and the call for accountability.
Life in the Amazon cannot be reduced to politics, economics, and power. Focus was given to the immorality of the debt, the staggering gap of loss due to disasters and war, and the trickle of relief. The destruction of biomes through mining, agrobusiness, and climate events are all recognized as grave strains on an integral ecology. President Lula and each country will struggle with this anew and the call for changes to be implemented, however limited, before a retake in Antalya, Türkiye for COP31 in 2026.
We are challenged to learn and act together as a people and as humanity. These are terrible times, and we are called to our true being though never to be finally resolved. Ultimately, if we reflect and find peace, life is too precious for all of us not to share hope and strive with all the youth throughout the world.
What might we have accomplished in the Spirit has much to do with getting in touch with our feelings and examining our thoughts, then finding our own peace and how we can continue in daily life with others. In this, we can humbly sense what we are grateful for, what has grown in our relations, and what gives us strength. It is very important that we are able to cool down after the contagious haste of the Blue Zone.
The Mass readings of the first week walked us through the ancient wisdom collected 50 years before Jesus walked the land. “Love justice, you who judge the earth; think of the Lord in goodness and seek him in integrity of heart; because he is found by those who test him not, and he manifests himself to those who do not disbelieve him.” (Wisdom 1:1-2) There is also God’s reminder to the rulers of the Earth and promise of safe passage to those who have faith and witness to the truth. (Wisdom 18-19)
The gathering of Catholic actors at COP30 is a time of gratitude for being together and the number is growing over the COPs. Coming together in all the haste is a time to relax and share what we are doing across civil society and in the COP learning sessions and negotiations and affirming that it is good. To be in Belém is not simply to build strategies and do the business of tough negotiation despite the challenges and letdowns to find unitive moments of collaboration and the healing worlds of community.
Catholic actors had over 40 bishops, many from their local dioceses in Latin America. They are listening to the cries of this urgent crisis that is the cry of their people and with whom they are increasingly journeying while reckoning with the extractivist economy and gigantic vulnerabilities of ordinary people. The bishops’ conferences of the global south issued several statements that are building this solidarity and calling for implementation of nature-positive solutions, peoples’ inclusion, and creditable financial mechanisms.
Many of the bishops and several of the cardinals were invited to speak in different events. Cardinal Fridolin Ambongo Besungu, Cardinal Jaime Spengler, Cardinal Filipe Neri Ferrão, and Cardinal Pablo Virgilio David spoke in multiple events directly with the policy negotiators and at the Peoples’ Summit. Involvement with the World Council of Churches and Brahma Kumaris is led by the Franciscans so there was a mobile pavilion of faith shared across the event.
Civil society and faith-based organizations do influence the negotiations through well-made statements and negotiated paragraphs with country representatives. They create another media context and disturb the proforma bickering between party groups, holding negotiators responsible. What is compromise in the face of exhausted country negotiators at the exploited end of a global economy? Integrity and the witness to power are the only strengths the vast margins of the world have, so that short-term perceived national interests of rich countries are given up for both those with power and without.
Perhaps this helps us understand the specific nature of Belém. Compared with previous climate conferences, there are strong Indigenous Peoples’ voices. Urgency and implementation are the agenda of most. It’s not about winning. The challenges grow at each step but collaboration in finding humble ways of an integral ecology on the ground are witness to what can be done.
The Global Mutirão is something we are all part of for all its limitations. This commitment helps us hold up our spirits and collaborate in community in caring for forest, water, air, seas, peoples, and all beings from sentient to the rocks that hold us in place and time.
We need the spirituality of place and people to carry the process on. Those from other places going home carry some token of this time and place with us, seeking to grow a new life of hope. People will continue with the different strategies calling for justice to be implemented, convey the message of Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum, and how to walk in the jubilee of hope finding synodality in this cry of the poor and cry of the land and seas. We are more truly church for this journeying together.
Photo: An indigenous tree at the exit from COP30 in Belém, Pará, Brazil