THE POPE HAS LEFT FOR BRAZIL - 12-HOUR TRIP AHEAD
Pope begins pilgrimage to Latin America
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON
VATICAN CITY, May 9 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI departed Wednesday on his first pilgrimage to Latin America — a test of the 80-year-old pontiff's stamina and how he intends to deal with pressing challenges to his church in the region.
The Vatican is promising he will deliver a tough message to politicians on poverty and crime during the five-day visit to Brazil — the world's most populous Roman Catholic country — as well as try to strengthen a church battling to retain its leading role in the region.
The German-born pope plans to lay out his strategy when he opens a once-a-decade meeting of bishops from throughout Latin America in the shrine city of Aparecida, near Sao Paulo, Brazil, South America's largest city.
The Vatican's No. 2 official said Benedict will issue a "strong message" on poverty, social inequality, drug trafficking and violence and on the exodus of Catholics joining Protestant evangelical churches.
"We hope these messages are heard, not only in the Catholic communities but by the political class," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, told reporters.
Benedict's predecessor, John Paul II, visited Mexico and addressed Latin American bishops just three months after assuming the papacy. Benedict has waited two years for his first trip to a region where nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics live.
The Vatican recently defended the pope, saying he was as concerned about poverty in the developing world as much as his predecessors. "It's not true that he's 'Eurocentric' as some claim," said Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi.
Benedict, who visited Brazil as then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1990, will celebrate several open-air Masses including a canonization ceremony for Brazil's first native-born saint, and visit a church-run drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.
But the focus will be on countering secular trends, such as the recent legalization of abortion in Mexico City, as well as the growing influence of evangelical Protestant groups, which the Vatican considers "sects" but have attracted millions of Latin American Catholics in recent years.
In Brazil, many are torn between the church's traditional teachings and the pressures of the modern world — with abortion at the forefront. The procedure is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger.
On Tuesday, some 5,000 people — both Catholics and Protestants — held an anti-abortion march in the capital of Brasilia ahead of the pope's visit.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will meet with the pope in Sao Paulo, but a spokesman told reporters the center-left leader does not plan to bring up abortion or other sensitive issues such as a government anti-AIDS program that distributes millions of condoms each year.
The pope will also face some opposition from within the Brazilian church, where liberation theology — which links spiritual growth to human rights — is still active among thousands of groups working with poor and landless communities.
As John Paul's close aide, then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict led a campaign against what the Vatican considers a Marxist-inspired movement. The Vatican set the tone for Benedict's trip by censuring the Rev. Jon Sobrino, a prominent champion of liberation theology in the region, and condemning some of his works as "erroneous or dangerous."
Despite inroads by evangelical groups and the legalization of abortion in Mexico's capital, Vatican officials say the church's scorecard in Latin America is not entirely bleak.
A study released in Brazil this week indicated the flight from the Catholic church stabilized from 2000 to 2003, even though the ranks of Protestants continued to grow.
On abortion, the Vatican points to countries such as Nicaragua which last year banned the procedure in all cases.
The May 9-14 pilgrimage will be Benedict's first lengthy trip as pope.
Although he appears healthy and has never missed a scheduled event, he said in an interview last year that "I've never felt strong enough to plan many long trips."
Except for a stop in Turkey, Benedict's travels have been confined to Europe. The only other trip scheduled this year is to nearby Austria.
Pope leaves for Brazil
ROME, May 9 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI left Rome Wednesday for Brazil for a four-day pastoral visit, the first of his pontificate on the American continent.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church flew out on an Alitalia Boeing 777 from Rome-Fiumicino airport and was due to arrive at Sao Paolo around 4:30 pm (1930 GMT).
On Thursday he is scheduled to meet young people in the city's Pacaembu stadium and on Friday will celebrate mass for the canonisation of Brother Galvao, Brazil's first saint, which is expected to attract hundreds of thousands of faithful.
On Friday evening he will take a flight to Aparecida, a shrine dedicated to the cult of Our Lady of the Apparition, the patron saint of Brazil, where he will on Sunday open the fifth assembly of the episcopal conference of Latin America and the Caribbean.
The conference, which will bring together 166 bishops and cardinals from the 22 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean for two weeks, is being held for the first time in 15 years.
Benedict's visit is expected to focus on the shrinking number of Roman Catholics in a region that is home to nearly half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics and the rise of evangelical sects.
Brazilian prelate Claudio Hummes, archbishop of Sao Paulo, raised the alarm about declining church numbers in October 2005, asking: "How much longer will Latin America still be a Catholic continent?"
In Brazil today, 64 percent of the population is Catholic compared with 74 percent 10 years ago, according to a new study published Sunday.
Meanwhile, the number of Pentecostal evangelicals has risen to 17 percent from its previous 11 percent, said the study by Datafolha based on 44,642 interviews.
What is more, Latin America has a severe shortage of Catholic priests, with an average of 7,500 faithful per priest compared with the world average of 2,677, according to Vatican figures.
Analysts say the 80-year-old pope, who is scheduled to touch down at Sao Paolo's Guarulhos airport at 1930 GMT Wednesday, will use his trip to Brazil to promote Christ's divinity over the politicized Jesus embraced by Latin America's liberation theologists.
Benedict is said to be convinced that the struggle for influence with evangelical sects revolves around the image of Christianity's central figure, the subject of his just-published book "Jesus of Nazareth."
However the pontiff argues that the pentecostal trend has little to do with liberation theology, the movement with Marxist overtones that swept the Latin American region, especially Brazil, in the 1970s.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, when he headed the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body for 24 years, the pope spearheaded opposition to liberation theology, notably condemning Brazilian proponent Leonardo Boff in 1985.
Latin America has heard little from Benedict in his first two years as pope.
The pontiff has stayed close to home, apart from a trip in November to Turkey, speaking frequently of his concern over the erosion of Christian values in Europe.
By contrast, Benedict's globe-trotting predecessor John Paul II made 18 trips to Latin America and the Caribbean over his long papacy, including two in his first two years.
The Latin American bishops are expected to discuss not only the rise of evangelical sects in the region, but also poverty and exclusion and the impact of globalization.
Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone said Sunday that the trip would be a chance to promote social justice in Latin America.
Bertone, the second most senior official at the Vatican, said: "Think of the violence which inflicts particularly the big cities, think of the drug trafficking that is becoming stronger and more aggressive, think of the social inequalities that cannot be bridged ... .
"In all these situations the Church is present above all to enforce the message of the gospels, but also to encourage ... a revolution of equality, justice and pacification that is in the very DNA of the Church."
Benedict's perceived neglect of Latin America has been a source of frustration for a region undergoing economic, political and religious upheavals amid a widening gap between rich and poor.
The problem is exacerbated by under-representation of the region at the Vatican, where the College of Cardinals who advise the pope counts only 31 members from Latin America out of 184, or fewer than one in five.
Pope on mission to win back
Latin American Catholics
By Angus MacSwan
Take note of this name. McSwan has had nothing but disparaging reports about Benedict XVI since he started reporting from Brazil a few days back.
SAO PAULO, May 9 (Reuters) - Huge crowds will welcome Pope Benedict on his first visit to Latin America starting on Wednesday but their fervor will not hide concern in the Vatican that the Roman Catholic church is losing its grip in the region.
The Pope's official business is to canonize Brazil's first saint and make the keynote address at a conference of bishops from Latin America and the Caribbean - home to nearly half the world's Roman Catholics.
The greater mission, churchmen and experts say, is to reaffirm church teaching and stem the loss of millions who have turned away from the faith to embrace Protestant groups.
"The key issue is the need for the church to re-evangelize fallen away Catholics but also those who remain so they won't leave," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a research group in Washington.
"They are also very concerned about the inroads that secular values are having in Latin America. Things like abortion, gay marriage, contraception."
Pope Benedict, 80, has a reputation as a conservative theologian who lacks the charisma of his predecessor Pope John Paul and has spent most of his career closeted in the Vatican.
He is best known in Latin America for leading a crackdown in the 1970s and 1980s on Liberation Theology, in which leftist priests worked with the poor and against dictatorships.
Many priests are waiting to see what guidance he will give regarding social action in a continent marked by widespread poverty and deprivation. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said he wanted to discuss with the pope how the church and government could work more closely on social policies.
Brazil has more Roman Catholics than any country in the world, with about 125 million. But the church's fierce opposition to contraception, abortion rights and sex outside marriage has generated growing doubts among followers.
A survey in CartaCapital magazine said 41 percent of those polled believed the Catholic Church had not evolved with society. Some 86 percent favored condom use and more than half did not agree with the church's stand on abortion.
"The Brazilian Catholic is less conservative than the Church. He says he follows the religion but doesn't necessarily want to follow the doctrine to the letter," the magazine said.
CartaCapital was the only one of Brazil's leading weeklies to feature the pope on the cover on the weekend before the five-day visit. Veja, Brazil's most widely read newsweekly, had a cover story on Charles Darwin, either by accident or design.
The Roman Catholic church has played a prominent role in Latin America since the first Europeans arrived on these shores five centuries ago.
Priests accompanied conquistadors as they waged war on the indigenous peoples, although some defended them. The Church has often allied itself with the poor and oppressed but at times it has also supported oligarchs and dictators.
More than 1 million people are expected to attend an open air mass on Friday at an airfield in Sao Paulo, where the pope will canonize the 18th-Century Friar Antonio Galvei. More than 300,000 will attend a second mass on Sunday in the city of Aparecida, the site of Brazil's biggest shrine.
But, said CartaCapital, "It's doubtful if Pope Benedict, with his intellectual style and Eurocentric vision of the world, will be capable of restoring the popularity of Catholicism."
(Additional reporting by Todd Benson)
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/05/2007 13.21]