This article is about something that has become an increasing problem for the Catholic Church in Brazil in particular: the evangelical sects. The problem of liberation theology goes back to the early 80's and does not seem to have died down
March 16, 2007
Pope plans Brazil trip as Church loses ground to evangelical sects
By Gina Doggett
VATICAN CITY (AFP) - 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 sects.
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 sects 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 Church numbers during an October 2005 bishops' synod at the Vatican.
"How much longer will Latin America still be a Catholic 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 stand against 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 Pentecostal sects, several bishops noted.
The trip will also shine the spotlight on a growing gap between the 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 Christian 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."