“We were all embraced by the feeling, like a gentle cloud of mist, that we were experiencing something historic . The circulating energy was recharged by the interventions, gestures, images, and personalities, culminating in a resounding expression of shared life.
Human beings are up to 70% water. At this meeting, the water within us, the water that is all of us present, has come together to speak , to denounce, to whisper to ourselves, to shout to the world. Because, although water is so attacked “that it no longer sings,” as Serrat says, it does speak. And what did it say…”
Having just read this, you’re probably blinking twice, maybe rubbing your eyes. Has Radical Fidelity suddenly gone the way of incense-soaked yoga mats and drum circles? Have we become evangelists for the Ganges or groupies for Burning Man? Fear not. We have not gone mad. We have not “evolved” into some crypto–New Age blog peddling Eastern mantras.
No, the madness here does not belong to us. It belongs to a Catholic priest—yes, a Catholic priest—who penned this treacly nonsense as a “report” from the Amazon Water Summit for the catholic outlet Religion Digital. Not a voodoo sorcerer. Not a tribal shaman. Not even an Anglican or Episcopalian, but a Catholic priest—ordained, collared, and allegedly consecrated to Christ—breathlessly recounting his spiritual experience at what amounts to a watery pagan jamboree in Iquitos, Peru (October 1–3, 2025).
This “summit” assembled bishops, clergy, indigenous activists, and green ideologues to hymn the “sacredness” of water and to preach “integral ecology” as if it were the Gospel. In Church-speak, it is sold as “synodality,” “listening to creation,” and “pastoral discernment.” In plain English, it is the Church dressing up eco-pantheism in chasubles and hoping the faithful don’t notice.
To any Catholic with a sensus fidei, this is not “theology” but pagan spectacle, an affront to the living God and an insult to the martyrs who bled for the Faith. But can we really be shocked anymore? Can we really feign surprise when priests gush about “water speaking” after watching their pope preside over ice-blessing rituals like some shaman of global warming? When the current pontiff is heir to a line of men who kissed the Koran, enthroned Buddha in the most sacred of Catholic sanctuaries, and dragged Pachamama—an idol—into the heart of St. Peter’s?
No, the priest, Fr. César L. Caro is not an outlier. He is a cog in the machine. This is not an accident. This is the fruit of a decades-long project. The systematic infiltration and usurpation of the Catholic Church by a counterfeit religion masquerading as Catholicism. It is a process executed with ruthless precision for over seventy years—and we are now witnessing its culmination.
The report reads more like the prologue to a New-Age retreat than the account of a Catholic missionary. We are told of vibrations, energy, shared life, and a cloud of mist—language saturated with the spirit of modernist immanentism, the notion that the divine is not transcendent but diffused through creation and human consciousness.
A century ago, Pope Pius X warned that this very type of vocabulary would dissolve the Faith into poetry. Pope Pius X taught that speaking about faith requires clear, precise, and unwavering proclamation of established doctrine, not personal experience or fluid interpretations. The prophecy is now fulfilled. The Church’s supernatural mission, to sanctify and teach, is replaced by emotional reverie about water and “shared life.”
Caro writes that at the summit, “the water within us, the water that is all of us present, has come together to speak.” He then puts into water’s mouth a manifesto:
“I am a subject, a you, interlocutor. I am not a resource… I am sacred, the divine fluid, the formula of life, the secret of the future.”
Here modernism reveals its core error—the collapse of the distinction between Creator and creation. In Catholic teaching, nature is good because it is made by God; but it is not divine. The voice that speaks in Genesis—“Let there be…”—is not echoed by the river; it is the command of the transcendent God.
To call water “sacred” in itself and to ascribe to it “rights” is to re-enact the oldest pagan temptation: to worship the elements. Paganism called the Nile a god; modernism calls it a “subject with rights.” The name changes, the idolatry remains. This is not ecology; it is baptized pantheism.
We are told that “rowing for water and human rights helps us forge synodality and walk the path of Francis’s dreams.” Once again, the vocabulary of revelation is replaced by that of ideology. The verbs of salvation—believe, repent, baptize—give way to row, dialogue, forge, dream.
The Church’s mission has never been to secure water rights or organize summits, but to save souls. The martyrs of the Amazon—those who shed blood for the Cross, not for “dialogue”—would hardly recognize this watery gospel. To identify the Kingdom of God with a humanitarian cause is to forget that Our Lord’s throne was not a conference dais but the wood of Calvary.
At the closing Mass, we are told, Cardinal Barreto “connected the Summit’s inspirations with the Church’s historical journey in the Amazon” and proclaimed the new motto: “We are Church, we are water, we are life, we are hope in action.”
What a load of horse manure!
We are not water; we are redeemed sinners washed in the Blood of Christ. The Church’s unity flows not from H₂O but from grace. To equate baptismal symbolism with hydrological activism is to evacuate the sacraments of their supernatural content. It is precisely this confusion between sign and thing signified that St. Thomas Aquinas warned against. When the sign is worshiped, the mystery is lost.
Observe the method. First, sentimental experience replaces doctrine (“we felt something historic”). Second, poetic personification replaces theology (“the water spoke”). Third, moralism replaces revelation (“we must care for the planet”). And finally, the Church is recast as an NGO of good feelings.
This progression—experience, symbolism, activism, dissolution—is the very pattern denounced by Pius X. Modernism, he said, “makes of the religious sentiment the principle of faith.” The article before us is evolutionism in devotional garb. An ever-shifting “church of water” that flows wherever emotion carries it.
A Catholic may indeed reverence creation, but only through it toward its Creator. The Psalmist sings, “The heavens declare the glory of God,” not “The heavens are God.” St. Francis praised Brother Sun and Sister Water because they reflected divine goodness, not because they possessed rights or voices of their own.
To defend rivers and forests is legitimate within the realm of prudence and justice; but to sacramentalize ecology is to forge a counterfeit religion. The new creed of “integral ecology” seeks to replace the supernatural order of grace with an earthly equilibrium—a harmony of waters and energies rather than of souls and God.
We are in big you-know-what. We do not need another summit but for Catholics to once again return to the Catholic Faith, to kneel before the Tabernacle, to confess that the Lord of all creation humbled Himself into the form of bread—not to deify wheat and water, but to raise fallen man to divine life. The modernist, gazing into the river, sees only his own reflection and calls it divine.
If the Church forgets the hierarchy of being—God above, man below, nature beneath—she becomes, as Pius X said, “a formless and unstable thing.” The Amazon Water Summit and its lyrical theology of mist and emotion exemplify that instability. It is the liquidity of doctrine dissolved in sentiment.
There is indeed water that speaks—but it is the Water that flows from the side of Christ, mingled with Blood, testifying to redemption. It does not demand rights; it offers grace. It does not murmur slogans; it whispers absolution. The Amazon may roar, but the still small voice of truth is heard only where faith is firm and reason illumined by revelation.
Christus vincit!
Christus regnat!
Christus imperat!
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For a sacrament to be valid, there must needs be 1) proper matter, 2) proper form, and 3) proper intention. For a man to be validly ordained a Catholic priest, there must be 1) imposition of a hand by a validly consecrated bishop, on the head of a man that is a baptized Catholic, 2) the proper "essential form" for the Rite used, and 3) the intention to do what the Church does on both the ordaining bishop and the ordinand. At this point, if a cleric is spouting nonsense like this, can we REALLY say he had the intention to be a Catholic priest, as the Church has always understood it?
The pre-V2 theologians are essentially unanimous: a doubtful sacrament is no sacrament. A priest spouting this crap should be viewed as a layman and not a priest.
Apostasies like this emanating from the clergy all the way up to the pope should - and do - foment righteous anger among properly catechized Catholics. This crap needs to stop. But lately, my anger is being displaced by a certain amount of sadness for the souls being led away from Christ by these blaspheming narcissists calling themselves priests and bishops. One could make a strong case that everything that’s gone wrong in Western Culture in the last 60 years can be in some way tied to the virtual dissolution and secularization of institutional Catholicism by the Second Vatican Council. “Culture is downstream from religion.”