The relationship between CEAMA and REIBA represents a commitment to unite efforts around the same purpose: to continue building a Church with an Amazonian face, close to the peoples, and committed to defending life, the territory, and the cultures that give identity to the Amazon. This articulation drives the construction of joint strategies that integrate pastoral action, intercultural education, and the care for our common home as expressions of the same evangelizing mission.
CEAMA brings together a wide diversity of ecclesial and social actors: indigenous peoples, apostolic vicariates, religious communities, missionaries, volunteers, educators, laypeople, and bishops, who participate actively in building a more synodal and intercultural Church. This richness of voices and experiences constitutes one of the distinctive features of an organization born to respond to the challenges posed by the Synod for the Amazon.
Along this path, REIBA provides a vision of education that transcends the traditional school model. Its proposal understands that educating in the Amazon means accompanying the lives of the peoples in all their contexts, strengthening the identity, memory, and hope of new generations. The intercultural bilingual education promoted by the Network contributes to the revitalization of native languages, the preservation of cultures, the transmission of ancestral knowledge across generations, and the care of the Amazon biome as an essential part of the life of the communities. It is an education that recognizes that the territory also teaches, that the elders are bearers of wisdom, and that ancestral knowledge dialogues with the challenges of the present to build a sustainable future.
The official constitution of CEAMA took place on June 29, 2020, in an act held virtually due to the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. On that occasion, it was created as a permanent body under the auspices of the presidency of the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM), and the Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes assumed the founding presidency, guiding the first steps of this historical process for the Church in the Amazon region.
Both CEAMA and REIBA find their inspiration and roadmap in Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia. Its four great dreams — social, cultural, ecological, and ecclesial — guide the work of both instances and find concrete expression in REIBA’s educational work, which promotes communities capable of preserving their cultural heritage, protecting biodiversity, and strengthening a spirituality deeply linked to the territory and to life.
A year later, on October 9, 2021, Pope Francis granted canonical recognition to CEAMA as a public ecclesiastical legal entity. This event marked a milestone in the history of the Church by consolidating an unprecedented ecclesial structure, in which not only bishops participate, but also religious men and women, laypeople, and representatives of indigenous peoples with voice and vote in the processes of discernment and decision-making.