BOA VISTA, Brazil -- Consolata Br. Carlo Zacquini was ministering among the Yanomami people in a remote area of Brazil, near the border with Venezuela, when gold miners invaded their lands.

RAPOSA, Brazil -- Summer evenings in the community of Raposa are golden and gentle. Half-wild horses wander in from the fields to feed on mangos that have fallen from huge trees in front of St. Isidore’s Catholic Church. A few young Makushi grab rakes to push the mangos into piles out of harm’s way. The setting sun seems so close, a giant ball of fire slipping behind the mountains that ring the prairie where the Makushi live. Makushi tradition says life exists as a kind of force — stkaton — that comes from the sun. It’s hard to disagree.

Bishop Dom Mário Antonio da Silva knows the Amazon is in trouble, but he doesn’t want its crises — political, ecological and cultural — to define the synod he will attend in Rome Oct. 6-27.

MANAUS, Brazil -- On the third finger of his left hand Oblate Fr. Robert Valicourt wears a black, wooden ring made from the pit of a tacumã palm tree, a plant native to the Amazon. 

ST. ALBERT, Alta. -- Star of the North Retreat Centre is making healing and reconciliation between Indigenous people and Canadian settlers a major element of its retreat ministry.

I rarely shut up. I also have a loud voice, though most of the time I am not aware how loud I am.

They came for a remarkable project ….

Thirty-five years ago this month, Pope John Paul II became the first pontiff to visit Canada. The impact of those 12 days in September hasn’t been forgotten.

Canadians can’t extinguish the thousands of forest fires raging across the Amazon region but the devastation should become a call for Catholics to forge an alliance with the Indigenous people of the Amazon, says the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.