Pope plans Brazil trip as Catholic Church loses members to evangelical churches
Pastor Dale Morgan
Saturday March 17, 3:09 AM
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Pope plans Brazil trip as Catholic Church loses members to evangelical
churches*
Pope Benedict XVI will head in May to Brazil, the world's largest Roman
Catholic country in a region where the Church faces rising competition
from evangelical Churches.
Thousands of Brazil's Catholics have renounced the Catholic Religion and
have now turned to Evangelical churches for Truth, Salvation and the
True Christian way.
The Vatican officially confirmed the trip Friday, nearly a year and a
half after it was announced in Brazil, where he will touch down in Sao
Paolo before heading to nearby Aparecida to open a conference of Latin
American bishops.
The trip will be the first of Benedict's nearly two-year-old pontificate
to the Americas, the Church's traditional stronghold.
The Vatican did not give details of the pope's programme, but local
church sources said he would celebrate an open-air mass in Aparecida,
near Sao Paulo, on May 13 before opening the 18-day Latin American
Episcopal Conference.
Participants will discuss the proliferation of evangelical churches
competing with the Catholic Church, as well as poverty and exclusion in
Latin America and the impact of globalisation.
Brazilian prelate Claudio Hummes, then Sao Paulo's archbishop, raised
the alarm about shrinking Catholic Church numbers during an October 2005
bishops' synod at the Vatican.
"How much longer will Latin America still be a Catholic controlled
continent?" he asked.
Hummes, whom Benedict appointed to the prestigious office of prefect of
the Congregation for the Clergy last year, said the Brazilian Catholic
Church had declined from 83 percent of the population in 1991 to 67
percent in 2005.
The Church's sex abuse scandal's along with its stand against , married
priests, its false teachings and doctrines as well as divorced and
remarried Catholics receiving communion -- reaffirmed in a papal
document just this week -- is a major factor prompting Catholics to
leave the Church for Protestant congregations, several bishops noted.
The trip will also shine the spotlight on a growing gap between the
Catholic Church hierarchy and the Catholic grassroots in Latin America
on questions of doctrine.
Most of the region's bishops backed a document released on Tuesday in
which the pope reaffirmed the requirement of celibacy for Catholic
priests and urged Catholic politicians to oppose legislation favouring
abortion, divorce or euthanasia.
But several Catholic associations and proponents of liberation theology,
popular across Latin America, voiced disappointment in the text.
Sao Paulo auxiliary Bishop Luiz Sringhini said the papal exhortation
addressed the "big question ... of whether Catholicism influences
society or is devoured by it."
Friday's confirmation of the trip to Brazil also came two days after the
Vatican took fresh aim at liberation theology, issuing a warning to one
of its leading lights, Spanish Jesuit priest Jon Sobrino.
Sobrino's books, widely distributed in Latin America, contain passages
that are "either erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the
faithful," the Vatican said.
The conservative pope, 79, is a strong opponent of liberation theology,
which took root in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s and focuses on
Christ as the liberator of the oppressed.
It emphasises the Catholic mission of bringing justice to the poor and
oppressed, particularly through political activism, and its advocates
were champions in the fight against oppressive South American regimes.
As head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for more than
two decades before becoming pope, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger
locked horns with Brazil's leading advocate of liberation theology,
Franciscan Leonardo Boff, in 1985, silencing him for a year.
Boff reacted to the Vatican's censure of Sobrino on Wednesday by saying
the move "discourages the poor, and it is bad for the Church to condemn
people with such a spiritual talent."