A Vatican official highlighted the importance of synodality and the integration of Indigenous knowledge in the Church’s approach to environmental and social issues.
Bishop Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, said Indigenous communities may not use “the up-to-date lingo of the environmental debate,” but it remains essential for the Church to “listen and in listening to give voice to their perceptions.”
The prelate made the statement in an online conference with attendees at the Asian Forum on “Celebrating Synodality & Indigenous Living Tradition in the Asian Church,” organized by the faith-based group Circle of Sacred Rice in Nepal on Nov. 11.
Bishop Tighe commended the forum’s focus on “a celebration of synodality and the Indigenous living traditions of the aging church,” calling it “an extraordinarily important initiative.”
He urged attendees to embrace the opportunity to learn from people “who have different ways of living, who have different value systems, who have different approaches to our world.”
Bishop Tighe’s message aligns closely with the Vatican’s broader commitment under Pope Francis to promote intercultural dialogue and environmental awareness.
He underscored Pope Francis’s vision of a “church that goes beyond itself… a church that reaches beyond, tries not closing on itself, on its own issues, on its own problematics, but is engaged and living fully in our world in a sense as citizens in the world.”
Bishop Tighe drew upon themes from Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on care for the Earth, stating that “we share a common home” and that sustainability must be a collective responsibility.
He highlighted the encyclical’s focus on dialogue, noting that achieving environmental goals requires input from “scientists, of economists and politicians” and “our religious voices, our traditions, our ideas, our wisdom, our understanding of what it means to be human and to live well.”
Bishop Tighe praised the insights that Indigenous communities offer, noting that “one of the problems as he [Pope Francis] sees it is that we in the West…we’re inclined to see the world as a resource to be used as a material that we exploit.”
By contrast, he said, many Indigenous cultures regard the land as “something sacred, something that we’re privileged to live in, something with which we live in community, not something simply to be radically used in different ways.”
Bishop Tighe stressed that “we need to enter this dialogue…with a genuine openness to learning from people’s traditions and ideas, and sometimes traditions that go back far longer than our own traditions.”
He called on the Church to approach intercultural dialogues with a spirit of “receptive learning,” quoting Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby’s concept of entering conversations “not to bring our own perspectives, but genuinely to see what can I learn, what is this other person to say to me that I won’t find within my own tradition that will fill a lack in me.”
Bishop Tighe reminded attendees of Pope Francis’s words in Laudato Si’, where he encourages people to “live our human existence as a joyful mystery to be contemplated and not simply a problem to solve.”
