Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon)

This exhortation is an invitation to the people of God to prayerfully seek justice and solidarity with all the Amazonian peoples. Pope Francis weaves insights from the Vatican's Amazon synod with his past writings -- including drawing heavily from his 2015 encyclical "Laudato Si', on Care for Our Common Home" -- and even native poetry to present his dreams of a world in which integral ecology is incarnate in and from the Amazon. He presents a vision of the Catholic Church in the Amazon united in defense of its tribes, trees, tradition and tributaries, offering an example for the wider church to adopt in other. "Today the Church can be no less committed," he writes. "She is called to hear the plea of the Amazonian peoples and 'to exercise with transparency her prophetic mission.'"