Pope Sends Carefully Crafted Messages in Brazil Trip

c. 2007 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ On his trip to Brazil last week, Pope Benedict XVI confronted an old foe _ Marxism _ and its influence on the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. Benedict also spoke out against the rising influence of secularism in the region, and acknowledged the surging growth of […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ On his trip to Brazil last week, Pope Benedict XVI confronted an old foe _ Marxism _ and its influence on the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America.

Benedict also spoke out against the rising influence of secularism in the region, and acknowledged the surging growth of Pentecostalism and other Protestant denominations that are proving hardy competitors to Catholicism.


But on the whole, the pope’s prepared statements and gestures stressed a upbeat message of evangelization and social action based on the Gospels.

“All the time he was offering solutions in a constructive way, rather than denouncing errors,” said the Rev. Robert Gahl, an American who teaches ethics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

Benedict’s desire to stress the positive reflects his general approach to pastoral visits. On one of his first international visits as pope _ to Spain in 2005 _ he surprised many by failing to raise the subject of same-sex marriage, which had recently been legalized over the strong objections of the church.

In Latin America, Benedict faced the particular challenge of overcoming an image of Vatican indifference to the region and its problems. Only days before his departure, Benedict’s spokesman felt the need to deny that the pope was “Eurocentric.”

During his long tenure as head of the Vatican’s highest doctrinal body, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger waged a long and largely successful war against liberation theology, a movement that sought to fuse Catholic social doctrine with Marxism. That fight earned him a reputation of being unsympathetic to the efforts for social justice that many Latin American church leaders have endorsed since the 1960s.

On his trip to Brazil, Benedict repeatedly asserted his commitment to such causes, culminating in his speech to Latin American bishops Sunday (May 13), in which he declared that the “Christian life is not expressed solely in personal virtues, but also in social and political virtues.”

But Benedict warned against the temptation to pursue social justice through materialistic ideologies _ a danger he identified not only with Marxism but with capitalism, which he described as promoting inequality and hedonism.


In that same speech, the pope deplored threats to the family from “secularism and ethical relativism” and “civil legislation opposed to marriage which, by supporting contraception and abortion, is threatening the future of peoples.”

Abortion is illegal almost everywhere in the region, but in recent years, several Latin American countries _ including Brazil, Argentina and Colombia _ have considered more liberal abortion laws. Last month, Mexico City legalized the procedure.

The subject unexpectedly dominated headlines for the first day of the pope’s trip, after Benedict, in answer to a reporter’s question, seemed to endorse the excommunication of politicians who support abortion rights.

For Benedict, opposition to abortion is inseparable from a Catholic social doctrine that calls for the protection of life “from the moment of conception until natural death,” as he told Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva upon his arrival in Sao Paolo.

In Latin America, where the anti-abortion movement tends to make its case in terms of human rights and not necessarily traditional values, the church’s stand on abortion fits easily with its support for social justice.

“One argument that is very effective in Latin American countries that have suffered from oppressive governments is that government and the state need to … protect the weakest and the most vulnerable members of society, including fetal life,” said Mala Htun, a professor of political science at the New School for Social Research in New York.


Moreover, Htun says, in their support for democracy and for egalitarian social policies, Latin American bishops have built alliances with left-wing groups _ including labor unions, peasant organizations, and indigenous rights groups _ that have “muzzled themselves” on abortion in order not to lose the support of the church.

Any perceived dilution of the church’s commitment to social justice would therefore undercut its efforts to prevent abortion, she said.

Other potential allies in the anti-abortion campaign include the growing Pentecostal movement, which now claims 15 percent of Brazilians, 9 percent of Chileans and 20 percent of Guatemalans, according to a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Although some Pentecostal churches favor legalized abortion in special cases such as rape or incest, none supports abortion on demand, Htun says.

Do Benedict’s relatively few and muted references to the “sects” last week _ compared with Pope John Paul II, who denounced those churches as “ravenous wolves” 15 years earlier _ signal a desire to collaborate with fellow Christians against a graver threat?

For the ethicist Gahl, the pope’s approach to Pentecostalism in Latin America reflects not political calculation but self-criticism on behalf of the church.


“There’s a deeper realization of the root of the problem, that it’s really our fault,” he said. “We need to do a better job of evangelization.”

KRE/LF END ROCCA

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