Nicolás Viel, a Chilean missionary from the Itinerant Network of the Triple Frontier (Brazil, Colombia, and Peru), shared his experience of service in the Itinerant Team, a living expression of synodality and mission incarnate in the Amazon.
With 27 years of history, the itinerant team was born from the dream of Jesuit Claudio Perani, who conceived a community of men and women—consecrated, lay, and secular—called to travel freely throughout the Amazon, without fixed structures, without haste, accompanying the life of the people with closeness, listening, and discernment.
“The itinerant team has its origins in a deeply synodal intuition,” says Viel. “Perhaps that term was not used then, but its theological and pastoral method is essentially communal and participatory. Our task is to be with the people, share their lives, listen, and from there accompany their processes.”
In its current presence in the triple border area between Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, the team seeks to resume its missionary journey in this strategic and diverse area, marked by human, social, and environmental challenges. The mission is carried out in communities of peoples such as the Kukama and Tikuna, accompanying processes of leadership formation, linguistic revitalization, community organization, and care for our Common Home.
“Our service is like yeast in dough,” explains Viel, “a discreet, close presence that adds to existing processes. We do not come to lead or invent anything, but to accompany and unite our fragilities with those of others, knowing that beautiful things are born from that union.”
The missionary emphasizes that the Amazonian Church offers profound inspiration to the universal Church: a martyred, incarnate, and prophetic Church, nourished by the witness of hundreds of men and women who have given their lives in defense of the faith, the peoples, and creation.
“The history of the Amazonian Church is a history of martyrs,” says Viel. “In them we find a powerful energy, a force of the Spirit that continues to encourage our communities. The Amazon is, at the same time, the most beautiful and most threatened territory. In it resound the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, which are one and the same cry.”
At CEAMA, we recognize in the testimony of the Itinerant Team a concrete expression of Pope Francis’ call for a Church that is outgoing, synodal, and incarnate, that learns from the peoples, listens to their cries, and walks with them in the search for new paths for life and mission in the Amazon.
