The Catholic Church is paying dearly

Many maintain that the greatest challenge of the Catholic Church in Latin America, once the most important bastion of the Vatican in the world, is the inexorable advance of the Protestant faith. Critics of Rome’s position indicate that the Catholic Church itself is responsible for this situation.

What are the main challenges of the Catholic Church in Latin America at the moment?

One of the greatest challenges is the loss of the faithful. According to a statistic of CELAM (Latin American Episcopal Conference), 10 thousand people per day leave the Catholic Church.

One of the great challenges is the loss of vitality of Latin American Catholicism in the face of a demanding religious competition from other Christian denominations, from new religious movements and new para-religious groupings that are arising strongly in the continent.

What is happening with the subject of poverty and the church?

One important second question is the role of the Catholic Church in front of the great problems of the continent, especially the one of poverty, exclusion, marginalization, that, far from being a problem that is on the way to a solution, as considered in the first CELAM conference and mainly in the second in 1968 when it spoke of poverty in Medellín as a central topic, it has become worse.

It is said that close to half of the population of the continent lives in alarming conditions. What is the role of the Church in that context?

One of the present subjects is the critique of the economic model that has reigned in the region in the last 25 years, which is the neoliberal economic model in a context of globalization that has made it so that the rationality of the market fundamentally takes priority over human conditions.

In that same line, the bishops consider the question of the corruption of values, referring to a continent that on one side is being threatened seriously with problems of exclusion and on the other side by a set of ideas and values in secular society as well as by new religious movements.

The Church perceives a loss of identity and of the identity of the Catholic substrate that marked the continent from the conquest. The loss of values is a great problem for the Church in front of subjects such as abortion, euthanasia, scientific advances. The Church is threatened by new logics, by common feelings that go further on, that exceed it.

What do you think is the cause for the loss of the faithful?

It is a problem of religious competition. On one side the new religious movements have sharpened in a very sensitive way new strategies of communication and religious diffusion, mainly through media, through more aggressive proselytism, to reach popular sectors, etc.

On the other hand the Church in Latin America has been suffering what could be called a process of becoming bourgeois. The Catholic Church loses with the supporters of Liberation Theology, who were condemned, a strong ascendant movement within the popular sectors.

What happened with that commitment to the poor in the 1960s?

In the 1960s, indeed from one of the meetings of the CELAM, the one in Medellín in 1968, a great paradigmatic line was set forth, the option for the poor. Many follow in this pastoral line, some flirt with Marxist positions, others adopted more secular positions and were repressed and relegated by the Vatican, especially under the pontificate of John Paul II.

That brought as a consequence a weakening of the presence of the Church in a missionary perspective with the popular sectors. The result is that given the dynamics of marginalization and exclusion that the continent lives within, there is a sector that is very abandoned.

What influenced John Paul II in this context?

The Church under John Paul II had a great preference for spirituality movements and middle-class and upper middle-class movements like Opus Dei, Legion of Christ, etc.

Nevertheless, at the popular level this becomes blurred and it is there where these movements of pentecostal, neopentecostal and new popular religiosities have emerged with such force that we have movements like the Brazilian Universal Church of the Kingdom of God that from the 1970s until now has grown in a spectacular way.

The Catholic Church is rediscovering that within the popular sectors, in the sectors of the suburban masses, farmers and migrants it is having ferocious competition and it does not know how to react in the face of this.

What do those that desert the Catholic Church find in these churches?

Something very simple, attention. They find a space of social encounter, where they have a name and a communication space where they coexist with other sectors, that provides another way into the economic and social dynamic of the countries of our continent, something the Catholic Church does not offer.

They find a full name, which is to say that they find a different treatment, a respect in terms of human valuation. Secondly, many of these movements, above all pentecostals and neopentecostals, offer a hope for life, that is to say, an ethic, possibilities for resolving the great problems.

Is the Catholic Church facing this challenge with some success?

I don’t think so. I believe that the Church is very worried. It has not had the capacity to be able to face the new religious movements. There are diagnoses and lamentations but there are no plans at a national, continental level that could make this process turn around.

It seems that there is a type of paralysis as well because to place themselves in the world of the poor, in the world of the underground economies is something very complicated for the Church.
 
The Church, because of the demographic explosion in Latin America, has a methodology of insertion that was already exceeded centuries ago.

What then can a church do that is interested in the poor?

The Church today does not have formulas. It feels very limited by itself, very self-repressed because in the 1970s and part of the 1980s it punished, it repressed, the option that it had developed with a methodology towards the poor, that is to say, Liberation Theology.

This was condemned mainly by the present Pope who then was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Joseph Ratzinger was one of the main promoters of the condemnation of Liberation Theology.

The pastoral agents, the priests, feel very repressed. They are not finding ways for how to enter into the world of the poor today.
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IN SHORT

With 30 million, Brazil is the country with the greatest number of evangelicals in Latin America, representing 18% of the population (9% in 1991). The greater percentage, however, is in Guatemala with 30%.

"Abundant fruits," are exactly what the Catholic Church in Brazil needs - the country with the greatest number of Catholics in the world - in front of the spectacular advance that the evangelical churches have experienced, who at the present time make up almost a quarter of the population. Brazil is not an exception. Close to 20% of the Latin American population belongs to Protestant churches.

Some analysts do not hesitate in indicating that this preoccupation constitutes one of the main objectives of the five day visit to Brazil.

In Guatemala the number of Protestants reaches almost to a third of the population. In recent years in Colombia five million faithful have left Catholic churches for evangelical churches.

The cause for the loss of nearly 10 thousand people per day, according to the CELAM document, is the “deficiency of pastoral agents,” the “inadequate evangelization in the past” and the “deficient pastoral care towards the poor.”

Meanwhile, the Chilean Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, president of the Conference of Latin American and Caribbean Bishops, attributes the advance of the evangelicals to the lack of active priests, nuns and pastoral agents, because of which the population has remained "without live contact with the communities of the Catholic Church."