Visiting Pope steps into
abortion battle in Brazil
By Terry Wade



SAO PAULO, May 1 (Reuters) - At a dilapidated clinic in a gritty section of Sao Paulo, doctors know that many of the pregnant Bolivian immigrants, shantytown dwellers and prostitutes they treat will go on to seek abortions elsewhere.

Abortion is illegal in Brazil, the world's biggest Catholic country, and back street abortions are rife, often leading to uterine infections and, in some cases, death.

When Pope Benedict visits here May 9, he will find his authority is being challenged, not just by sexual behavior in Brazil, but also by changing attitudes to abortion.

Brazilians tend to be sexually liberal - having multiple partners is common, prostitution is legal, and even the president says "nearly everybody likes sex."

Many ignore the church on birth control and abortion. The government hands out condoms - also opposed by the Catholic church - to prevent the spread of AIDS. And doctors blame Catholic leaders for hurting women's health and weakening the fight against AIDS.

"The church gets in the way," said Dr. Tania Lago, who runs women's health programs for Sao Paulo state.

Safe, clandestine clinics cater to rich Brazilians, but poor women induce abortions with an illegal drug called misoprostol, bought in Sao Paulo street markets. Too much can result in a ruptured uterus. Others rely on homemade potions containing peroxide, which causes burns, or improvised devices.

For Dr. Ruth Loreto Sampaio de Oliveira, a gynecologist at the Centro de Saude Escola Barra Funda clinic in Sao Paulo, this is her worst fear.

"We've had patients die after resorting to risky abortions," she said.

Supporters of abortion want President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to confront the church on abortion rights and birth control now that he is in his second term and cannot seek re-election.

Polls have shown Brazilians would reject abortion if Lula's health minister is successful in bringing the debate to a referendum.

But anti-abortion leaders say they are concerned by developments in other Catholic countries: Portugal legalized abortion after a plebiscite in February, and Mexico City legalized abortion in April.

"This year has been worrisome for people who believe life starts at conception," Luiz Bassuma, head of the anti-abortion caucus in Congress, said in a newspaper column.

Activists believe abortion will eventually be legalized as the church, while powerful, has lost political sway since the end of military rule in 1985 and the emergence of AIDS.

Government policies already clash with church doctrine on family planning, science and AIDS.

The health ministry provides everything from free birth control pills to tubal ligations, and gives abortions in cases of rape or when a mother's life is in danger. Congress has approved stem cell research on frozen human embryos.

Some states allow gay civil unions. One federal prosecutor wants courts to deem gay marriage a constitutional right.

Moreover, officials hand out millions of free condoms each year to prevent AIDS, many at public schools, angering the church but drawing praise from the United Nations.

"The church lost the battle over AIDS policy," said Dr. Lago of Sao Paulo state. "Because it's a disease that kills, politicians were willing to face off with the church."

Catholics make up 74 percent of Brazil's 185 million people and their rates of abortion and contraceptive use mirror the broader populace, studies show.

"There's a huge gap between what Catholics think about reproductive health and the rules the church hierarchy defends," said Dulce Xavier of Catholics for Free Choice.

On such issues, the church looks increasingly out of touch.

"We cannot agree with condoms because they turn life into a life without responsibility," Cardinal Geraldo Majella, head of the National Bishops Council, said just before this year's Carnival celebrations, when the government gave out condoms.

Archbishop Angelo Amato last week called gay marriage evil, abortions terrorism, and their clinics slaughterhouses.

Church teachings on abstinence fall on deaf ears in Brazil, where love motels with names like Desire and Opium line the highways.

"If I told my patients to practice abstinence, everybody would laugh in my face," said Dr. Marta Campagnoni, who runs family planning classes at the Barra Funda health clinic.

RELIGION-BRAZIL:
Pope to Come Looking for Lost Sheep
By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 2 (IPS) - On his upcoming visit to Brazil, Pope Benedict XVI will find that the Roman Catholic Church, which used to be absolutely predominant in this country, has been losing members rapidly since the 1980s to the growing evangelical Pentecostal groups. And even more former Catholics now profess no religion at all.

"Christianity in Brazil is diversifying, but the main social phenomenon to be noted is the growth in numbers of people without a faith at all, which for the first time is assuming mass proportions," priest and theologian José Oscar Beozzo, executive secretary of the Ecumenical Centre Services for Evangelisation and Popular Education (CESEP) and for many years head of the Church History in Latin America Study Centre (CEHILA), told IPS.

The segment of the population that has stopped going to church and left off following any religion, but without necessarily becoming atheist, rose from 0.8 percent of the population of Brazil in 1970 to 7.4 percent in 2000, according to the state Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which means the proportion increased almost tenfold in 30 years.

This process is unevenly distributed across the country. In the poor northeastern state of Piauí, less than one percent have abandoned all formal religion, compared to 28 percent in the poor Rio de Janeiro suburb of Queimados, Beozzo noted.

The Brazilian Catholic Church has experienced the loss of adherents at other times in its history, but generally in smaller numbers. For example, intellectuals left the church in the late 19th century, and anarchist or communist workers left it in the 20th. "But now it's the poor, who have traditionally held fast to religion, that are leaving it in droves," he said.

"This is because of the economic crisis of the past 25 years, and the deep sense of disillusion and utter neglect felt by poor people in the shantytowns ringing the big cities, who no longer expect anything from the state, the Church, or God," the historian said.

Catholicism is also losing many members to Protestant churches. In 1970, 5.2 percent of Brazilians attended Protestant churches, a proportion that climbed to 15.4 percent by 2000, while the portion of the population that identified as Catholic in the census declined from 91.8 to 73.6 percent over the same period.

Three weeks ago, the Vatican reported that there were 155.6 million Catholics in Brazil in 2005, or 84.5 percent of the country's population of 184 million. The data were based on Catholic baptism registers. However, it is a widespread custom in this country to baptise newborn infants, who do not necessarily become committed Catholics.

The growth in the number of evangelical Pentecostal churches, and of charismatic movements within Catholicism and traditional Protestant churches, such as the Lutheran and Presbyterian churches, is another recent phenomenon in Brazil. "The traditional churches are also becoming 'pentecostalised,'" Beozzo said.

The spread of Pentecostalism in Brazil is associated with rapid urbanisation and internal migration. People have flocked to the slums ringing the cities, as well as to the Amazon jungle region. Rondonia, in the southwestern Amazon jungle, is the state with the greatest religious diversity, and its population is largely made up of Brazilians from other regions who have arrived in the last three decades.

"Pentecostals are more agile, more mobile, and freer to preach in small churches which could be homes, garages or similar simple locales. A pastor can be trained in just two years," said Beozzo, who pointed out that in the Catholic Church, it takes eight years to ordain a priest.

In his opinion, the new Pentecostal forms of religion are growing because of three factors. The exacerbated individualism of capitalist society has broken down the religious traditions of families. "A family with four different religions within the same household used to be unthinkable. But now religion is an individual question, and membership is personal," Beozzo said.

Also, the new religious movements offer healing, and the desperately hopeless reality of poor people is such that their illnesses may be physical, or caused by "fear and insecurity," which can be overcome by a welcoming church community.

Exorcism, too, by identifying a demon to be expelled, is another practice that can attract poor people who suffer from a string of misfortunes, like losing their job or their family, or having children who are addicted to drugs, and other problems of unclear origin that "seem inexplicable," he said.

"The diversification of religious options in recent decades has given people the sense that they have freedom of choice," which explains the decline of Catholicism in Brazil, said Silvia Fernandes, a consultant with the Centre for Religious Statistics and Social Concern (CERIS) and a professor at the Federal Rural University in Rio de Janeiro.

But changing one's church affiliation "is more frequent among Pentecostals and neo-Pentecostals than among Catholics," she told IPS. A CERIS study found that in 2004 only four percent of Catholics had adopted another denomination, while 85 percent of Pentecostals said they had changed churches, which suggests there is a considerable amount of "intra-evangelical circulation," she said. [Thanks! This sort of answers what I commented on the other day - that the Pentecostal/charismatic phenomenon has not been around long enough from us to tell how long its new adherent will stay with it.]

"Historically, Brazil has never had a single 'pure' Catholicism, but multiple versions, so that Catholic identity is very fluid and culturally influenced," said Fernandes, who downplayed Catholic Church losses, arguing that "many elements of Catholicism have been maintained, in spite of the denominational changes, and the Christian universe is still the religious matrix of Brazil."

The shrinking proportion of Catholics in Brazil was not arrested by Pope John Paul II's (1978-2005) three visits to the country. The trend influenced Pope Benedict's decision to visit Brazil May 9-13, and to celebrate the 5th General Episcopal Conference for Latin America and the Caribbean in Aparecida, 167 kilometres from the southern city of Sao Paulo.

For the last 28 years, Brazil has been excluded from the presidency of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM) and other organs and mechanisms of institutional decision-making because of a policy followed by the Vatican during John Paul's papacy, Beozzo said.

The appointment last year of Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, former archbishop of Sao Paulo, as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy at the Vatican, restored a communication channel that may have been a determining factor in the decision to hold the episcopal conference in Brazil.

"The (Vatican's) policy was not good for Brazil, nor for the Catholic Church. Now there is a change from previous policy," Beozzo concluded.

===============================================================

CARDINAL HUMMES SAYS: 'BRING THEM BACK'

Brazilian cardinal urges outreach
to Catholics who left Church


May. 2, 2007 (CNA/CWNews.com) - The prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, has called on the faithful in Latin America to reach out to fallen-away Catholics who have joined other Christian denominations.

"We can’t sit and wait in the parishes," the cardinal said. "We should go out ourselves to bring the baptized back. We should go out to poor on the outskirts of town, who need our solidarity, our warmth. We should help them with their daily problems, but also to fulfill their dreams, because the poor also have dreams."

"In recent years," Cardinal Hummes continued, "the Church in America has lost 1% of its faithful each year." Therefore, he encouraged Catholics to create new initiatives of evangelization in the region where almost half of the world’s Catholics live. "Perhaps the future of worldwide Catholicity is at risk," he said.

Among the reasons Catholics leave the Church to join other Christian denominations is "the moral relativism imported from Europe and introduced into Latin America, especially by local leaders, the mass media and intellectuals," the cardinal said, citing the recent legalization of abortion in Mexico as an example.

"The Church in Latin America should ask itself what it has not done right and why it has not been able to implant a more profound faith in the baptized," he continued, warning also that this is not a problem affecting solely the Church in Latin America but also in the rest of the world.

===============================================================

What a strange report! It has the who and what, but not the where, when and why that are the other essentials for any news story - for the lead paragraph at any rate!

It doesn't tell us when the cardinal made the statement or what the occasion was for the statement. Was it simply a written statement he released from his office? Or a letter he wrote to someone in Brazil (a specific bishop, a group of bishops, priests?)? Or an interview he gave someone - then who, where, when, what else did he say?

Memo to CNA/CWNews: Editors, do your job; and reporters, please don't skip the basics.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2007 7.10]

Perhaps this is an answer to those who are too pessimistic about the future of the Church in Latin America - or of Latin America itself, for that matter. And for those like Sandro Magister, who unacccountably wrote a few days ago that the major problems of Latrin America are not even on the bishops agenda for this conference. As if there were any way to speak about Latin America apart from those problems!

We should all share the faith of the Holy Father who always tells his priests and bishops, "You cannot hope to do everything. But start with the essential. Pray, do not stop talking to God. Then do your best with what you have to do, and He will do the rest." In the same way, the first step to approaching the social problems of Latin America is for the priests to and committed laymen to do the work of evangelization right - preaching the Word of God with their own lives as active testimony to that Word, and trust the rest to God. More they cannot do, and more is not asked of them.



Catholicism Seen as Key to Latin American Unity;
Vatican Aide Says Challenge Is Preserving Tradition

ROME, MAY 2, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The challenge for Latin America is preserving a "great Catholic tradition," for which the upcoming episcopal conference in Brazil will be a key event, says a Vatican official.

Guzmán Carriquiry Lecour, undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity, spoke with the Italian magazine Il Consulente Re about the 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean, to be held in Brazil this month.

Benedict XVI will inaugurate the conference in Aparecida on May 13. The Pope has asked Carriquiry to attend the conference as an expert.

In the interview, the 63-year-old Uruguayan professor spoke about modern attempts to revitalize practices from pre-Columbian civilizations.

"The great symbols of Latin American unity are not indigenous ones because, before the arrival of the Spaniards and Portuguese, the continent was totally fragmented - a Babel - without the slightest awareness of itself," he said.

"The true symbols of unity are Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Christ of the Andes, the Church as the sacrament of unity among our peoples in Catholicism," he added. "The Gospel incarnated in the peoples is the deepest element of the historical-cultural originality that we call Latin America."

Carriquiry spoke of the changes facing indigenous peoples, many of whom migrate to large Latin American cities to escape poverty. He calls them "sectors which, for far too long, have been humiliated, exploited and marginalized."

"Indigenous people demand respect, dignity and access to all the benefits of education, work, cultural progress, genuine human promotion, solidarity and justice toward the most needy - to be truly integrated within the national societies and to take part as fully entitled citizens in the building of nations," the Vatican aide pointed out.

"However," he added, "another matter altogether is trying to rekindle sorcerers, shamans, ancient indigenous cosmogonies - the attempt of an arbitrary archaism, stemming more from ideological manipulation than from a true answer to the needs and demands of indigenous communities."

For the first time, representatives from the United States, Canada, Spain and Portugal will vote at the bishops' general conference, a change that Carriquiry called "a very favorable gesture."

"Aparecida will be a Catholic event," he said. "Indeed, the Catholic imprint is to be found particularly in the fact that the Pope himself has summoned the conference, chosen the theme and wished to personally inaugurate the symposium in Aparecida, which is to be […] marked by a collegial impulse, in communion with Peter's successor.

"The crucial point for the bishops of Latin America is to safeguard and replicate the great Catholic tradition of our peoples.

"This tradition, Latin America's most valuable gift, the most significant wealth of its peoples, is besieged and sometimes eroded by dominating cultural factors, which are widespread by international communication powers, increasingly hostile to Catholicism."

Carriquiry said that he considers the "main challenge" not to be the growing influence of Protestantism in the subcontinent.

Rather, "it is fundamental to return to the sources of our faith, to carry out the 'getting to the essential' about which Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, in order to avoid getting caught up in secondary issues," the Vatican aide said.

He added: "In this sense, the first thing to do is to look within ourselves, at home, to see whether and in what way the event of Christ's presence is a surprising and decisive fact in the lives of people, families, communities and nations."

The undersecretary of the Vatican dicastery mentioned hunger, disease, misery, drug trafficking and "the unconstrained political violence of guerrilla and even of terrorist activity" as "signs of death" in Latin America.

He added: "The continent grows economically, perhaps in a 'showy' way, but the struggle against poverty and the scandal of enormous inequalities are not faced appropriately.

"In large cities, insecurity and delinquency are an everyday matter. A 'global culture' is being extended and strong pressures are exerted toward overlooking and trivializing even the abominable crimes of mass abortion, the proposal of euthanasia and genetic manipulation.

"Thank God, our democracies are holding out; but more and more autocratic deviations are arising, with the risk of gradually smothering those democratic liberties that were reconquered during the 1980s at the cost of so much suffering and sacrifice, even of human lives."

Among the issues to be dealt with in Aparecida, the undersecretary of the Pontifical Council for the Laity points out that "one idea launched by the [bishops] is that of a great 'post-Aparecida' continental evangelizing mission."

"For the moment," he said," the plan is not fully defined. It is important that the conference should truly reach the hearts of Latin Americans, and give rise to a tremendous spiritual and missionary drive."

The 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean will gather some 300 participants, including delegate bishops and special envoys. The conclusions of the conference will serve to orient the Church's pastoral action in the region for the coming years.

From the special site of the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo for the Pope's visit, here is an announcement today, translated from Portuguese:



The Executive Secretariat in charge of the Pope's visit in Sao Paolo announced today the program for the vigil that will precede the Canonization Mass for Frei Galvao on May 11.

The theme of the vigil is "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord."

It will be held at Campo Marte where the open-air Papal Mass will take place the following morning. Various church communities from all over Brazil are taking part as organizers, hosts and participants in the prayer vigil.

The faithful will be allowed to come and take their places for the Mass starting Thursday midnight, but the vigil itself will not start until 2 a.m. and will last till 8:30 a.m.

Earlier, youth groups announced that most of them will proceed from Pacaembu Stadium Thursday night after their rally with the Pope in a torchlight procession to Campo Marte, where they will take part in the Prayer Vigil. This was especially important, they said, for the thousands of youths coming from other parts of Brazil who will not have to worry about lodgingfor this particular night.

The Prayer Vigil is divided into five blocks of an hour each, during which 'prayerful readings' from Deus caritas est and Sacramentum caritatis will alternate with prayers and songs. A magazine with excerpts from the Pope's homilies will also be distributed as supplemental reading to the main documents.

Two groups have even undertaken to carry on a continuous 'intercession' starting at midnight till the Mass starts so that everything may run well.

The blocks and the themes for their respective hours are as follows:

Block 1 - 02:00-03:20
"Christianity begins with an encounter"
The Glorious Mysteries

Block 2 - 03:20-04:40
"Love opens us up to our neighbor"
The Joyous Mysteries

Bloco 3:- 04:40-0600
"The Eucharist, source and summit of Church life"
The Luminous Mysteries

Block 4: 06))-0:700
"Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord -
the messenger of peace"

Block 5: 07:30-0:830
The Canonization of Frei Galvao

The Pope is expected to arrive at Campo Marte for the Mass at 9:00 am. Friday, May 11.

Fonte: Secretaria Executiva da Visita do Papa

The papal visit site of the Archdiocese of Sao Paolo has posted an intreractive map showing the places and times where the Pope will be during his visit to Brazil.

www.visitadopapa.org.br/pagina.php?id=48

John Allen posted his weekly column one day early, and it's a fairly comprehensive preview of the Papal trip to Brazil, done in Allen's usual systematic and fact-filled fashion.


A look ahead to Benedict in Brazil
All Things Catholic
by John L. Allen, Jr.
Friday, May 4, 2007



Editor’s Note: May 9-13, Pope Benedict XVI will visit São Paolo and Aparecida, Brazil, in conjunction with the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM). John Allen will be travelling on the papal plane, and will be posting reports on the trip to his Daily News and Updates column on NCRcafe.org.



For a pope often styled as “Euro-centric,” the Brazil trip offers a vital opportunity for Benedict XVI to convince the people of the southern hemisphere, which includes two-thirds of the 1.1 billion Catholics in the world today, that they, too, stand at the center of his pastoral concern.

The purpose of the trip is for Benedict XVI to open the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM). Given that roughly half the Catholics in the world live in the region, the CELAM gathering, designed to craft strategy for the church for the next decade or so, amounts to a critically important crossroads for Roman Catholicism.

It’s also of direct importance for the United States, given the growing Hispanic presence in the U.S. church. Already, 39 percent of Catholics in the United States are Hispanic, many recent immigrants from Latin America.

Though CELAM organizers would not phrase it quite this way, the issues that are likely to loom largest in Aparecida can be expressed in terms of four “P’s”: Poverty, Pentecostals, Priests, and Politics.

Poverty: According to the United Nations Human Development Report, Latin America has the most dramatic gap between rich and poor in the world, and Brazil has the widest such gap in Latin America. In turn, these disparities generate crime, corruption, alcohol and drug addiction, and violence.

The northeastern city of Recife in Brazil, for example, has a murder rate twice that of the most violent cities in the United States, with roughly 80 homicides per year for every 100,000 people. Honduras has a murder rate five times the global average, mostly due to the growth of maras, or youth gangs linked to the drug trade. This situation is of obvious concern to the church, since poverty and its discontents shape its daily pastoral experience.

The Catholic church has long been on the front lines of efforts to promote justice. For the past 12 years, for example, the Brazilian bishops have sponsored an annual march called the Gritos dos Excluidos, or “Cry of the Excluded,” in major cities to draw attention to the plight of the poor.

Some priests, religious and pastoral workers have died to defend the poor. One prominent case in point is Notre Dame de Namur Sr. Dorothy Stang, an American missionary in Brazil, shot to death in 2005 by two armed men allegedly working on behalf of wealthy ranchers, who resented Stang’s defense of the Amazon and of poor farmers. Stang was executed at point-blank range; one of the killers later said that as she was shot, she was reading aloud to them from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Many Latin American Catholics will be looking to Benedict XVI for encouragement in these efforts. It’s an especially important hurdle for the pope to clear, given that as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he led the Vatican’s crackdown on the liberation theology movement.

Though Ratzinger insisted that his concern was with faulty theology, not with the church’s commitment to the poor, those experiences nevertheless made him an ambiguous figure in some circles in Latin America. In that light, the Brazil trip affords Benedict a crucial opportunity to exhibit his social concern.

There’s certainly a track record to build on.

On April 23, for example, Benedict wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, current president of the G-8, demanding the “the rapid, total and unconditional cancellation” of the external debt of poor countries, describing it as a “grave and unconditional moral responsibility, founded on the unity of the human race, and on the common dignity and shared destiny of rich and poor alike.”

In a recent message to the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, Benedict highlighted three key challenges: 1) the environment and sustainable development, 2) respect for the rights and dignity of persons, and 3) the danger of losing spiritual values in a technical world. If he can weave these themes into his remarks in Brazil, observers believe he will go a long way towards winning hearts and minds.

Pentecostals: While Latin America is home to almost half the world’s Catholic population, in some sense the Catholic church is under siege. Belgian Passionist Fr. Franz Damen, a veteran staffer for the Bolivian bishops, found that the number of conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism in Latin America during the 20th century actually surpassed the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 16th century.

In 1930, Protestants amounted to one percent of the Latin American population; today it’s between 12 and 15 percent. A study commissioned in the late 1990s by CELAM found that 8,000 Latin Americans were deserting the Catholic church for Evangelical Protestantism every day. Some religious demographers believe that Guatemala has already become the first majority Protestant nation in Latin America.

Theories to explain the attrition abound. Some conservatives blame liberation theology for politicizing the church, while liberals fault the hierarchical and clerical nature of Catholicism. Conspiracy theorists point to heavy funding and logistical support from Pentecostal and Evangelical churches in the United States.

In the end, however, most observers seem to believe that the key factor is the failure of the Catholic church to deliver even rudimentary pastoral care to a large segment of the population, leaving millions of nominal Catholics without any real catechesis, spiritual formation or regular access to the sacraments. That created a vacuum which the Pentecostals have exploited. In turn, this failure is attributed to a severe priest shortage. (That point will be addressed below.)

One response to the Pentecostal challenge has been the growth of the Catholic charismatic movement, an enthusiastic and spontaneous form of spirituality focused on the gifts of the Holy Spirit: prophecy, speaking in tongues, miraculous healings, and inspired preaching.

A recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that 62 percent of Guatemalan Catholics call themselves “charismatic,” the highest percentage in the world, followed closely by Brazil at 57 percent. Overall, charismatics now account for roughly half the entire Catholic population of Latin America.

Some observers believe the growth of the charismatic movement is helping to stem the Pentecostal tide, because it offers most of what Latin Americans find attractive about Pentecostalism within the Catholic church. Others, however, worry that it too closely mimics the Pentecostals, especially when it comes to the “prosperity gospel” and an emphasis on immediate emotional gratification.

In that light, two challenges await Benedict XVI.

First, can this notoriously cerebral pope, famous for generating more light than heat, wear enough of his heart on his sleeve to win over audiences steeped in the charismatic style? Second, can Benedict affirm the enthusiasm and deep faith of the charismatics, while at the same time ensuring that they remain rooted in the broader pastoral concerns of the church?

Priests: By universal consensus, the shortage of priests throughout most of Latin American has created enormous holes in the church’s network of pastoral care. While the priest-to-person ratio in the United States is 1 to 1,229, in Brazil it’s 1 to 8,604, and in Honduras it’s 1 to 14,462.

The experience of Fr. Ricardo Flores, pastor of San Jose Obrero parish in a residential neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, is typical: he’s responsible for his large urban parish, as well as 14 other churches in the area that have no resident priest; he’s a professor at the seminary, teaching a full load of four courses each semester for around 60 students; and he’s the ecclesiastical moderator for two large national movements.

Though there are upticks in vocations in some countries, there’s no foreseeable future in which there will be a sufficient number of priests to staff all the parishes in Latin America, to say nothing of comforting the sick, teaching the young, and conducting the other ministries of the church. For many Latin American Catholic leaders, the answer is obvious: lay empowerment.

“Our current pastoral model is exhausted,” said Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras. He favors an aggressive program of forming laity to fill the gaps, learning from the success of the Pentecostals in fielding small armies of lay preachers and evangelists.

Given that liberation theology also promoted lay empowerment, however, in a way that critics saw as forming a kind of “church from below” in opposition to the hierarchy, other Latin Americans remain wary. In that light, if Benedict XVI chooses to speak positively about lay collaboration, it could have decisive significance for which way CELAM chooses to move.

Politics: Across much of Latin America, leftist governments have risen to power. These governments, to be sure, are hardly homogenous. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Eva Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador represent, to different degrees, classic leftist populism, while Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Michelle Bachelet of Chile are more akin to European Social Democrats.

In many cases, these governments came to power with support from the Catholic church, motivated by its concern for social justice. (Such was the case in Brazil, for example). In fact, the leftist candidate in Paraguay’s next presidential election may well be an ex-Catholic bishop: Fernando Lugo of the San Pedro diocese.

Yet the ascent of these leftist governments has also spelled trouble for the Catholic church. The Venezuelan bishops, for example, have repeatedly criticized what they see as an authoritarian crackdown under Chavez. In a television interview last July, Morales of Bolivia said the bishops had “historically damaged the country” by functioning as “an instrument of the oligarchs.”

Even when church/state relations are formally polite, the leftist tide poses challenges to what church leaders regard as the Catholic identity of Latin America, especially on issues of sexuality and the family. Governments in Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Chile have already adopted legislation loosening legal restrictions on abortion, and a similar bill is making its way through the process in Brazil. In March, Mexico City legalized same-sex unions, following the lead of other Latin American cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paolo.

Some observers see these trends as the first stirrings of Western-style secularism in Latin America.

“For the first time, some in Latin America are turning away from religion altogether, which is new,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the emeritus archbishop of Washington, D.C., in an April 21 interview. (See McCarrick: Pope will be a hit in Brazil.)

In that regard, Benedict XVI will no doubt want to bring his struggle against the “dictatorship of relativism” to Latin America. The question is how to rally his troops without inadvertently feeding a form of public expression which the pope has said he regrets in the West - a church that’s better at explaining what it’s against rather than what it’s for, better at saying “no” than “yes.” The tone Benedict sets in engaging these questions could help shape the approach the Latin American bishops adopt.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2007 2.28]

Here is the second part of the column for Friday, May 4.


I’ll offer four brief sidebars to the Brazil trip.

The day after Benedict returns to Rome, a trial will begin in Brazil’s Amazon region of a rancher charged with being one of the “intellectual authors” of the murder of Sr. Dorothy Stang, the 73-year-old American missionary killed in 2005.

Stang spent 30 years in Brazil, striving to protect the Amazon rainforest and to defend the rights of poor farmers. She was legendary for her perspicacity, sometimes camping out overnight in the offices of local politicians and police officials until they agreed to enforce environmental and land-use laws.

Observers say the trial is a landmark case, since the wealthy landowners who order such killings are almost never brought to justice.

Reached by phone at his home in Palmer Lake, Colorado, on May 1, David Stang -- Dorothy’s brother and a former Maryknoll priest -- said he’s “optimistic” about the outcome, especially since one of the shooters already convicted for Stang’s murder named the rancher, Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura, as one of the men behind the attack. David Stang plans to travel to Brazil to attend the trial.

On the other hand, Bastos himself does not appear to be especially concerned. Two government agencies recently had to compel him to remove 1,500 head of cattle which he had illegally allowed to graze on the very plot of land where Stang was shot to death in 2005. She had sought to have that plot of land protected for use as a sustainable development project.

David Stang said he’s a bit concerned that Pope Benedict’s presence in Brazil may “overshadow” the trial, distracting media attention from the case and thereby reducing some of the public pressure on a notoriously recalcitrant judicial system in Para state. Stang said the “gossip” in Brazil was that the court waited until the dates for the pope’s trip were announced in order to schedule the trial, hoping for precisely this effect.

Yet Stang said the pope’s presence could also prove to be helpful, especially if he were to mention his sister by name. Even in the absence of such a reference, however, a more general appeal for justice for the poor, and those who speak in their name, would also be welcome.

Stang said he would sum up his sister’s legacy as “a deep love for the poor in Brazil, a deep love for the environment, and an understanding of the connection between the two.” He said he has “no doubt” that she’s a saint.

“She represented the best of the Sermon on the Mount, and she died for it,” he said. “Such martyrs are saints.”

* * *

Speaking of saints, Benedict XVI will canonize the first Brazilian-born saint in church history during his five-day trip, on May 11: an 18th century Franciscan named Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao, or “Frei Galvao,” whose claim to fame is that he developed a paper “pill” inscribed with a prayer to the Virgin Mary, which devotees ingest in hopes of a miracle. The pills are reputed to have cured everything from depression to hepatitis.

The pills are made by religious sisters at the Convent of Light in São Paolo, where Galvao died in 1832 at the age of 83. They contain the following prayer: “After the birth, the Virgin remained intact / Mother of God, intercede on our behalf.” Devotees swallow three pills over nine days while reciting the prayer.

In 2006, devotees consumed an average of 90,000 pills a month, according to Brazilian press reports. Since Galvao’s canonization was announced, that number jumped to 140,000.

The miracle which cleared the way for the canonization was reported by a Brazilian woman, who had a deformity in her uterus which doctors said would make it impossible for her to carry a baby to term. After ingesting Galvao’s pills, however, she said she was able to carry her child for seven and a half months until he was delivered by Caesarean section.

The pills are not the only sign of supernatural accomplishment attributed to Galvao. He is also said to have levitated while praying, and to have had the ability to read minds and to witness events even when he wasn’t physically present.

Pregnant women sometimes borrow a frayed piece of rope believed to have been Galvao’s belt, and wear it around their mid-section in hopes of a smooth birth. Devotees even hammer off tiny chunks of the wall from Galvao’s monastery and brew them in a tea, which they drink as a sort of elixir thought to promote good health.

Auxiliary Bishop Edgar Moreira da Cunha of Newark, New Jersey, the only Brazilian-born bishop in the United States, said in an April 30 interview that until the canonization was announced, Galvao was not a well-known figure.

“Frankly, I didn’t know about this thing with the pill until recently,” he said. “It wasn’t known in Brazil. It’s a very localized thing in São Paolo.”

Devotion to Galvao has not always played to positive reviews. Some see it as superstitious and tinged with elements of folk magic. Cardinal Aloísio Leo Arlindo Lorscheider, now retired from the Aparecida diocese, said in 1998 that he considered the devotion “ridiculous,” and prohibited local nuns from making the pills. (They kept doing it anyway.)

Da Cunha said he doubted the canonization would stir much controversy. For most people, he said, the only thing that matters is that a Brazilian is being honored.

“In Brazilian culture, and this is probably true of all Latin America, rituals and external forms of piety, the statues and all these things, are very, very popular, it’s embedded in the culture,” he said. “People like that and they go to these places. Our church is diversified enough to have room for all these options.”

* * *

The CELAM conference is taking place in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Aparecida, one of the most popular Marian shrines in the world. Its annual traffic of pilgrims is rivaled only by Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, Lourdes in France, and Fatima in Portugal.

The devotion to Our Lady of Aparecida dates to 1717, when three local men were fishing in the Paraíba River with little success. At one point, their nets brought in a statue of the Virgin Mary which was missing its head. They cast the nets again, and this time found the head of the statue. Thus the image, which is roughly three feet tall, received its name: “she who appeared,” or aparecida. After that, the story goes, the fishermen’s luck changed, and they brought in a large haul of fish.

Devotion to the statue slowly began to build, especially as reports of miracles began to circulate. Our Lady of Aparecida, regarded as a “black Madonna” because of the dark color of the Virgin’s skin, was eventually named the Patroness of Brazil in 1929 by Pope Pius XI.

The basilica built in her honor rivals St. Peter’s in size, and is thought to be the largest Marian temple in the world. It attracts six to eight million pilgrims each year, with especially large crowds around Oct. 12, the Feast of Our Lady of Aparecida.

In one sign of its cultural importance, a Brazilian television network produced a soap opera in 2001 that told the story of the beginnings of the Aparecida devotion, which was called “The Patroness.” There’s also a $70 million theme park connected to the shrine, called the “Aparecida Magic, Cultural, Religious and Recreational Park.” One unusual feature, dubbed “the world’s only moving Nativity,” features 84 life-size, computer-controlled puppets showing three stages of the birth of Jesus.

John Paul II consecrated the shrine in Aparecida on July 4, 1980. A few days before the pope’s visit, someone grabbed the image and shattered it into several pieces, but artists painstakingly put it back together.

However relaxed their Catholicism may be at times, Brazilians are nevertheless protective of the Virgin of Aparecida. On Oct. 12, 1995, a pastor from the Pentecostal movement Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, named Sergio von Helde, kicked a miniature clay version of the statue on Brazilian television, trying to make a point about the emptiness of icons. Reaction was so ferocious that von Helde had to flee Brazil for Africa until the controversy died down.

In conjunction with Pope Benedict’s trip, the shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida recently registered trademarks for a new line of products, including images, candles, books, rosaries, games made of stone and porcelain, and bedding and t-shirts for children with the Virgin’s image.

“The church is not a corporation, but the sanctuary needs to generate income to pay the salaries of almost 1,000 employees and to pay its bills,” a spokesperson said.

One improbable fruit of the pope’s visit will be a spurt in the number of local businesses in Aparecida equipped to handle credit cards. It has long been a source of frustration for some pilgrims that only about half of the shops, restaurants and hotels can take a charge. By May 9, however, that number should be 80 percent, thanks to an assist from the local government. The state is also investing in improvements in roads and sidewalks, as well as construction of six new hotels.

* * *

After historic gatherings of CELAM in Rio de Janeiro (1955), Medellin (1968), Puebla (1979) and Santo Domingo (1992), which confronted the military dictatorships that once dotted Latin America and wrestled with internal tensions over liberation theology, most observers expect the 2007 edition to be a more practical and pastoral affair. Though Benedict XVI goes home on May 13 after the formal opening of the general conference, the meeting itself does not conclude until May 31.

A total of 265 people will take part in the general conference, which includes 162 voting members, 81 invited guests (such as bishops from other parts of the world, including four from the United States), eight observers and 15 periti, or theological advisors.

The three co-presidents of the general conference are Cardinals Francisco Javier Errázuriz of Santiago, Chile, the President of CELAM; Geraldo Majella Agnelo of São Salvador de Bahía in Brazil; and Giovanni Battista Re, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops in Rome.

Among the 162 members of the General Conference are 15 nominated directly by the pope. This group is dominated by 11 current or former Vatican officials, including American Cardinal William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Much like a Synod of Bishops in Rome, preparations for a CELAM general conference unfold over several years. In 2005, the secretariat of CELAM issued a “preparatory document,” intended to guide discussions within bishops’ conferences, priests’ councils, religious communities and lay groups. In 2007, CELAM put out a “synthesis” of the results, which will serve as the point of departure for the discussions in Aparecida.

In broad terms, the document identifies “evangelization” as the theme uniting all five General Conferences of CELAM. It then lays out the main challenges facing the church in Latin America, based on the feedback to the 2005 preparatory document. The challenges are phrased in terms of “faces that are looking to us.”

Among them:

The marginalization of indigenous populations and groups of African descent;

A double exclusion of women, on account of both their socio-economic situation and their sex, which, the report says, is compounded today by “ideological feminism” and by a culture of “consumerism and spectacle,” which threatens to “subject women to new forms of slavery”;

The hardships experienced by “the poor, the excluded, the unemployed, migrants, displaced persons, farmers without land, those looking to survive in the networks of the informal economy, and all those deprived of a dignified life”;

“The sick, drug addicts, the disabled and the elderly who suffer in solitude and do not enjoy the right to a dignified life and the care they deserve. We also remember the victims of violence within families ...”;

Victims of kidnapping and of armed conflicts;
Crime, corruption, drugs, terrorism, and those who “abuse power and engage in ideological manipulation”;

The need for dialogue with members of other Christian confessions, other religions, agnostics, atheists, and the indifferent;

The need for a pastoral response to those who have left the priesthood, those who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, homosexuals, and all those who “lead a double life, adding to the pain of the disorder a sinking fear of being discovered”;

The “hegemony of economics and technical-scientific” thought, including a “colonization” of political and scientific life by the market;

Pluralism and the emergence of subjectivity;
The impact of globalization;
The post-modern search for meaning;
A crisis of the family;
Urban culture;
The exercise of power in Latin America.

The document surveys strengths that the church brings to addressing these challenges, including:

Its consistent defense of the poor;

A dense network of institutions and programs in the areas of education, health, social welfare, culture, and the promotion of workers and families;

The willingness of church members to defend the vulnerable with their lives, if necessary;
A post-Vatican II emphasis on the biblical and patristic roots of the church, which has led to a renewed appreciation for the Word of God;

The growth of lay activity, such as lay catechists, the flowering of popular religiosity, base communities, and new lay movements;

Liturgical renewal;
A post-Vatican II opening to culture, to history, and to the world.

Finally, the document adds a “confession” of certain deficiencies that need to be corrected in the church.

“Consistent social transformation is accomplished only slowly and gradually, and the church is no exception,” it says. “The ecclesiology of the council, without a doubt, renewed ecclesial life, but it must continue to challenge us. Here it’s not only the socio-cultural aspects that weigh upon us, but mainly the reality of sin in us, the members of the church, which demand sincere repentance and personal conversion, as well as a more evangelical stance. Only thus can our errors and deficiencies be pardoned and corrected.”

“We discussed, to mention some examples, clericalism, attempts to return to the past, secularized readings and applications of the council’s renewal, a lack of self-criticism, the need for authentic obedience and an evangelical exercise of authority, an overly moralistic approach that weakens the centrality of Jesus Christ, acts of infidelity to doctrine and to ecclesial communion, the weakness of our preferential option for the poor, discrimination against so many women and groups of people, the scant support given to laity involved in public service, an approach to evangelization with little zeal and without new methods and modes of expression, an individualistic spirituality;

".. an over-emphasis on the sacraments while neglecting other pastoral tasks, a certain slowness in the commitment to democracy, a lack of creative application of the rich patrimony that constitutes the social doctrine of the church, and the use of a language that has little significance for contemporary culture and which sometimes does not respect the pluralistic character of our society and culture.

"We have to ask forgiveness for having departed from the Gospel, which asks of us a style of life more faithful to the truth and to charity - simpler, more austere and more rooted in solidarity. We ask for courage, persistence and docility to grace in order to continue the renewal initiated by the Second Vatican Council.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2007 2.34]

I was trolling tonight for a primer I am putting together on Sao Paolo, when I found an excellent backgrounder in something called the Economist Cities Guide, which pointed me to this items dated May 3 in the Economist itself.

I appreciate this for its 'calmer' tone with regard to the 'gains' of Pentecostalism in Latin America than we have been used to [the Economist did run a much-quoted lengthy article about the religious phenomena in Latin America last December, which we should have in NEWS ABOUT THE CHURCH], and provides other more encouraging facts about Catholicism in Brazil than the doom-and-gloom we have been reading. More importantly, he 'gets it' about the point of this apostolic trip!


Lighting on new faiths or none
May 3rd 2007 | APARECIDA AND MEXICO CITY
From The Economist print edition

In his first Latin American visit,
pope Benedict XVI will find a less divided church
facing stronger rivals




EVEN on an ordinary Sunday, the vast basilica of Nossa Senhora Aparecida is barely big enough to contain the worshippers who gather for morning mass. Votive candles, in a separate room, produce the heat of a bonfire.

The “hall of promises” is stuffed with offerings to the Virgin, whose image was found nearby by three fishermen in 1717 and who has been performing miracles ever since: plastic limbs acknowledge healing, a model aeroplane a job gained with an airline.

Aparecida, in São Paulo state, is Brazil's version of Lourdes or Fátima. Pope Benedict XVI chose it as the site of the fifth conference of bishops from Latin America and the Caribbean, which is meant to set the course for 450 million or so of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics.

The inaugural mass on May 13th will crown Benedict's four-day trip to Brazil, his first long-haul journey since becoming pope two years ago. He will also canonise the country's first native-born saint and hold a stadium-sized “encounter with youth”.

Benedict's choice of Aparecida for the conference suggests a desire to guide Latin America's Catholics back to traditional spirituality after decades of strife between progressive and conservative wings of the church.

“Our great mission is to reach people who belong to the church but have lost a sense of living in accordance with the faith,” says Raymundo Damasceno Assis, the archbishop of Aparecida.

Belief in God is as widespread in Brazil as in the United States, says Antônio Flávio Pierucci, a sociologist at the University of São Paulo, but religious practice is close to Europe's wan levels. The numbers saying they are of no religion is small but growing.

Some in the Catholic church fear that it is losing its grip over public morality. Local governments in Buenos Aires and Mexico City have recently legalised gay unions; the latter legalised abortion last month. Brazil's health minister has called for a plebiscite on the issue.

The more familiar threat to Catholic hegemony in Latin America comes from Pentecostal Protestantism. Born in the United States, this began to spread south a century ago but it has taken off since the restoration of democracy in the 1980s. According to the World Christian Database, a statistical service based in Massachusetts, more than 80% of Latin Americans are still Catholic. But that figure has been falling swiftly.

In Brazil, the world's largest Catholic country, the church has lost adherents at a rate of 1% a year since 1991, mainly to Pentecostal churches. Fewer than three-quarters of Brazilians are now Catholics while 15% are Protestants (known locally as “evangelicals”). In Mexico, 7.3% were Protestants according to the 2000 census; the figure may be almost 20% today. In Guatemala, some 30% are Protestant.

Traditional varieties of Pentecostalism emphasise a strict moral code of personal behaviour, including teetotalism and marital fidelity. Newer groups have added a gospel of self-enrichment. They offer a customer-friendly faith, telling the poor and uprooted that Christ can improve their lives and that He can be approached through ecstasy rather than ritual.

The Pentecostals spread the word through television networks, CD releases and pastors who require only a pulpit and a Bible rather than an elaborate seminary education. In Brazil the ratio of Protestant pastors to worshippers is 18 times higher than that of priests to Catholics, according to a new study by the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a business school. The business model works: 44% of church donations in Brazil come from Pentecostals, and only 31% from far more numerous Catholics.

By all these methods, Pentecostal Protestantism has acquired a large presence among the poor and the lower-middle class. In Brazil Pentecostalism goes along with migration to both the agricultural frontier and the cities.

Cidade Tiradentes, a poor neighbourhood in São Paulo, is 30% Protestant and 40% Catholic (and 22% “without religion”, triple the national average), notes Cesar Romero Jacob of Rio de Janeiro's Catholic University. Rich Jardim Paulista, in the city's centre, remains 83% Catholic. Pentecostalism is now making similar inroads in the poorer fringes of cities in the Andean countries, such as Lima.

While the Catholic church sticks to Spanish, in Mexico Protestants use indigenous languages to spread the word and have converted half of the country's indigenous people, claims Arturo Farela, who heads an organisation of Protestant churches. Much the same goes for the highlands of Guatemala.

Paradoxically, these are the constituencies that not long ago the Catholic church in Latin American made most effort to represent. At their second regional conference, held at Medellín, Colombia, in 1968, the bishops declared a “preferential option for the poor” and embraced many of the tenets of “liberation theology” (a kind of Christian socialism).

This effort placed many priests in brave opposition to military dictatorships and spawned innumerable “base communities”, grassroots groups that tried to spread faith and social justice at the same time.

The influence of liberation theology proved to be greater in politics than in the pulpit. It contributed to the rise of Brazil's ruling Workers' Party, and ushered priests into Nicaragua's Sandinista government in the 1980s. The seeming marriage of Catholicism and Marxism alarmed Pope John Paul II, whose native Poland was rebelling against communism. He appointed more conservative bishops.

As the Vatican's chief theologist, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who became Pope Benedict in 2005—silenced liberation theologians such as Brazil's Leonardo Boff. Just as significantly, the base communities failed to win over the poor. “If your husband beats you, you can't wait for Brazil to become a Christian utopia,” points out Andrew Chesnut of the University of Houston.

Nowadays the Catholic response to the Pentecostal challenge is to imitate it. The “Charismatic” movement, also an American import, rouses the faithful with spirit-filled worship, Christian pop music and slick television.

Brazil's most famous churchman is no longer Mr Boff [Surely that is an exaggeration of who Boff was even at his 'peak'!]but Marcelo Rossi, a physical-education teacher turned priest who has been known to perform aerobics during his services.

“What we see today is the pentecostalisation of Latin American Christianity,” says Mr Chesnut. He estimates that 75-80% of Protestants in the region are Pentecostals and that in Brazil at least half of active Catholics have gravitated towards the Charismatic movement.

The Catholic church has strengths besides the ever-popular Virgin and saints. It remains the region's most respected institution, according to polls. Priestly vocations, after decades of decline, have been rising since the 1970s, although they lag population growth. Brazil is sending missionaries to the United States, Africa and Europe, a reversal of the historic flow.

That manpower is supplemented by more than 1m lay “catechists”, says Edward Cleary, a priest who teaches at Providence College in Rhode Island. Bishops are reviving parishes and the tradition of tithing. The Catholic church has not escaped paedophile scandals. But it has largely avoided the money scams that dog some Pentecostal churches. The Getulio Vargas study found that in Brazil defections from Catholic ranks have stopped. The number of Pentecostals continues to grow but at the expense of the irreligious.

The bishops' conference may be less disputatious than its predecessors. Democracy and the end of the cold war have drawn some of the sting from the arguments between conservatives and progressives.

Dom Raymundo says the bishops will reaffirm the church's preference for the poor, but he insists that social change begins with the transformation of the individual believer. In the coming fights against abortion and the use of embryonic stem cells, the Latin church is probably more united than its North American counterpart. According to a recent poll, just 16% of Brazilians want to change a law that makes abortion illegal unless the mother has been raped or her life is endangered.

That does not put to rest nagging questions about the shape of a church with too few priests to sustain its traditional structure. Benedict will arrive in Brazil fresh from having censured Jon Sobrino, a liberation theologian in El Salvador, for over-emphasising Christ's humanity. [That's some spin! The point is not that Christ's humanity is over-emphasized, but that his divinity is being questioned oer even denied!]

The original draft of the conference guidelines was modified after pressure from the many in Latin America who take a less hierarchical view of the church and want a greater role for the laity.

“For us, the pope is father and pastor” rather than an “authority figure”, says Carlos Francisco Signorelli, who heads the National Council of Brazilian Laity. In Aparecida, Benedict may reveal how he sees himself. [I wish the newspaper had given a byline to the article. It sounds like it might have been written by their on-site correspondent which would explain his ease with some facts and figures he gives which I have not seen in other pieces. But about Benedict himself, shouldn't the reporter have looked up at least what the Pope has been saying all these past two years? When did he ever set himself up as 'authority figure' rather than as father andpastor? The last line of the story is really lame!]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2007 14.15]

Take your pick! AP cites a survey by a Brazilian Foundation that's quoted in almost every report about Brazil for its data, and sees a hopeful trend, while Reuters cites the much-quoted Pew data on Pentecostals/evangelicals that seems to be the only multi-nation sutdy available so far about the phenomenon and speaks of the 'rising tide'....

Catholic decline stabilizing in Brazil
By TALES AZZONI


SAO PAULO, Brazil, May 3 (AP) - A steep decline in the number of Brazilian Catholics may be stabilizing after decades of losses, according to a survey released just days before Pope Benedict XVI's arrival in the world's largest Roman Catholic country.

The percentage of Catholics stayed about the same from 2000 to 2003, reversing a trend in which millions of Brazilians abandoned the faith, according to an analysis of government statistics released Wednesday by the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

Brazilians claiming to be Catholic dropped to 73.9 percent in 2000, from 88.9 percent in 1980, census figures show. The South American country has a population of 187 million.

While in 2003, the number fell only a fraction to 73.8 percent, said the foundation, an academic institution that also conducts surveys.

The study's coordinator, Marcelo Neri, said the number may be stabilizing due to the country's improved economy, adding people may be more likely to change religions during hard times.

But Silvia Fernandes, a sociologist with Rio de Janeiro's Federal Rural University, said it will be impossible to verify the foundation's numbers until the results of Brazil's 2010 census are available.

"We have had the same trend for the past 40 years," Fernandes said. "It's unlikely we would see such a sudden change."

The pope arrives in Brazil next Wednesday.



Rising Protestant tide
sweeps Catholic Brazil
By Todd Benson


CARAPICUIBA, Brazil, May 3 (Reuters) - For years, Ronaldo da Silva's daily routine consisted of drinking himself into a stupor until he passed out on a sidewalk.

Now he spends his days praying and singing with hundreds of fellow Christians at the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Carapicuiba, a sprawling shantytown on the outskirts of Sao Paulo where Pentecostal congregations are found on just about every block.

"I'd probably be dead or in jail if it weren't for this church," said da Silva, a 38-year-old former Catholic who claims God cured him of epilepsy and helped him straighten out his life when he converted to Pentecostalism a decade ago.

Conversions like da Silva's are increasingly common all over Brazil, where a boom in evangelical Protestantism is steadily chipping away at the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church.

The trend, which is playing out all across Latin America, poses a major challenge for Pope Benedict, who arrives in Brazil on May 9 for a five-day visit largely aimed at blunting the decline of Catholicism in this continent-sized nation.

Although Brazil still has more Catholics than any other country in the world, with about 125 million, the percentage of believers that practice the Vatican's brand of Christianity has been dropping rapidly in the last three decades.

When the late Pope John Paul II visited Brazil in 1980, 89 percent of Brazilians identified themselves as Catholic. By 2000, when the last census was taken, the share of Catholics in the population had fallen to 74 percent.

The number of evangelical Protestants nearly tripled in the same period to 26 million, or about 15 percent of the population. That growth, which is expected to continue, is dramatically altering the religious landscape of a country where the national identity has been intertwined with Catholicism since the Portuguese landed 500 years ago.

"The face of Christianity in Brazil, and all over the developing world, is increasingly Pentecostal," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a research group in Washington.

Pentecostals are not Brazil's only "evangelicos," as Protestants are called here. Mainstream churches such as Presbyterian and Lutheran are also present, but Pentecostalism is by far the fastest growing kind of Protestantism.

More than other Christians, Pentecostals believe that God, acting through the Holy Spirit, plays an active role in everyday life. They belong to denominations such as the Assemblies of God and the Universal Church, which was started in a Rio de Janeiro funeral home in 1977 and now has more than 2 million members.

Pentecostalism is especially strong in poor urban areas, where the precariousness of daily life - blackouts, violent crime, high unemployment - can make people seek divine intervention. Many converts are also attracted to the pop-style music and dynamic liturgies, which resonate with contemporary tastes more than the traditional Catholic Mass.

At the Universal Church in Carapicuiba, the weekly Saturday night service at times looks more like a dance hall than a religious temple, with worshippers flailing their arms in the air and singing in unison. Some, like the former alcoholic da Silva, frequently break into tears as they look to the sky and thank God for their good fortune.

"The language of evangelicals is simple, direct, with minimal theology, making it easily understood by the masses," said Silvia Fernandes, a sociologist at the Center of Religious Statistics and Social Research in Rio de Janeiro.

Evangelical Protestants are also a political force in Brazil. About 10 percent of members of Congress are evangelicals, acting as an influential legislative caucus. Three of the last four state governors in Rio were Protestants, and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva aggressively courted the evangelical vote in his re-election campaign last year.

The Catholic Church, which is also losing followers to secularism, has responded to the Pentecostal boom by borrowing some evangelical thunder. In a movement that has come to be known as the Charismatic Renewal, some Catholic churches in Brazil have adopted animated worship styles and Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues and divine healing.

The best-known proponent of renewalist Catholicism is Padre Marcelo Rossi, a former aerobics instructor turned pop-star preacher from Sao Paulo who sells millions of CD's and even starred in a movie in which he played the Archangel Gabriel.

So far, however, the shift to renewalism has done little to reverse the evangelical tide - a trend that Catholic leaders acknowledge is worrisome.

"I'm not going to say that it pleases us when believers leave the church," Odilo Scherer, Sao Paulo's new archbishop, said in a recent interview with the newspaper O Estado de Sao Paulo. "Maybe our methods are inadequate."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2007 14.24]

The press council of the San Paulo tourism bureau estimates that the Pope's visit will cost the city 2.4 million reais (about 900,000 euro) in preparing all the infrastructure and organization necessary for the expected influx of about 1.5 million visitors to Sao Paulo.

The expense includes renovation of parts of the historic Benedictine monastery where the Pope will stay during his three nights in Sao Paulo.

In return, the city expects to generate about 60 million reais (22 million euros) during the visit.

[That's not bad! A return-on-investment that's at least 22 times !]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 04/05/2007 16.32]

www.visitadopapa.org.br/
www.celam.info/


A LOOK AT SAO PAULO


The building-dense Avenida Paulista, the main street in the central business district, as seen from the residential neighborhood of Jardins


São Paulo- pronounced sa~w~(nasal) paw.lu]; terminal -o sounds in Portuguese are pronounced like -u or -oo;
Portuguese for Saint Paul.

São Paulo is the capital of the state of São Paulo in southeastern Brazil. The city has an area of
1,523 square kilometres (588 sq. miles) and a population of just over 11 million (2006 estimate), which
makes it the largest and most populous city in the Southern Hemisphere and a global city. Some argue that
Sao Paulo is the world's second largest metropolitan area.

Sixteen million people live in the greater São Paulo metropolitan area as defined by the government Região
Metropolitana) — making it the second most populous city in the world. However, in the Extended Metropolitan Area
(Complexo Metropolitano Estendido) of São Paulo, there are nearly 29 million inhabitants, more than any other
city in the world except Tokyo, Japan with 35 million.

The region forms an almost large urban corridor, or megalopolis, with Rio de Janeiro and Volta Redonda.


Unlike Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo is an inland city, as can be seen from the satellite pictures
showing the extent of its urban sprawl.


The nearest coastline hardly has any beaches to speak of, unlike the miles and miles
of incomparable beaches in Rio de Janeiro just a few hundred miles north.

Rio's famous Copacabana beach, one of its string of wide beaches
along the Atlantic Ocean.

The state of São Paulo is also highly populated, however most metropolitan areas hug São Paulo with the
exception of Ribeirão Preto and a handful of other cities further away. The entire state has
a population of over 40 million people.

São Paulo is located on a plateau that is part of the Serra do Mar (Sea Range), itself part of the vast
region known as the Brazilian Highlands, with an average elevation around 800m (2,625 ft) - though
at a distance of only about 70 km (40mi) from the Atlantic Ocean.

Rolling terrain prevails within the urbanized areas of São Paulo, but to the north, the Serra da Cantareira
boasts higher elevations and a sizable remnant of the Atlantic Rain Forest. The entire region is tectonically
very stable, and no significant seismic activity has ever been recorded.


Brief History
Jesuit missionaries José de Anchieta and Manoel da Nóbrega founded the village of São Paulo de Piratininga
on January 25, 1554. Along with their entourage, they established a mission named Colégio de São Paulo
de Piratininga aimed at converting the Tupi-Guarani Native Brazilians to the Catholic religion.

Located just beyond the Serra do Mar cliffs, overlooking the port city of Santos, and close to River Tietê,
the new settlement became the natural entrance from the South East coast to the vast and fertile plateau
to the West that would eventually become the State of São Paulo.


Modern reconstruction, in Patio do Colegio, downtown, of the Jesuit school (now a museum) and church which marked
the foundation of the city in the 16th century

In the 17th and 18th centuries, groups of explorers who called themselves the Bandeirantes traversed forests
and new territories within the Latin American continent searching for gold, diamonds and other riches.

The Bandeirantes are regarded as being responsible for a great deal of the Brazilian territorial expansion beyond
the Tordesilhas Line and for the discovery of many mines of precious metals and stones.


There are several monuments in honor of their contribution to the city,
including the Monumento às Bandeiras, one of the landmarks of São Paulo.

São Paulo officially became a city in 1711. In the 19th century, it experienced a flourishing economic
prosperity, brought about chiefly through coffee exports, which were shipped abroad from the port of
neighbouring city Santos.

After 1881, waves of immigrants from Italy, Japan and many other countries emigrated to São Paulo
to work at the enormous coffee plantations established in the State.


Left, Avenida Paulista, in 1902; right, today.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the coffee cycle had already plummeted due to, among other factors,
a sharp decline in international coffee prices. The local entrepreneurs then started investing in the
industrial development of São Paulo, attracting new contingents of overseas immigrants to the city.


Demographics


Edificio Italia building in downtown 'Sampa'

People from the city of São Paulo are known as paulistanos, while paulista designates anyone from
the whole of São Paulo state, including the paulistanos. The city's motto is Non ducor, duco, which
in Latin translates as "I am not led, I lead". A famous nickname for the city is "Sampa".

São Paulo has significant ethnic diversity in comparison to other major cities:
· 5,000,000 are direct or indirect descendants of Italians.
There is a building named Edifício Itália
(Italy Building), in honor of the Italians. It was once the tallest building of the city (165m).
· 3,000,000 people are direct or indirect descendants of Portuguese.
· 2,000,000 are direct or indirect descendants of Spaniards.
· 1,500,000 people have direct or indirect African ancestry.
· 1,000,000 people are direct or indirect descendants of Germans.
· 850,000 people are direct or indirect descendants of Lebanese immigrants —
by far the largest number of Lebanese outside Lebanon.
· More than 1 million people are direct or indirect descendants of Japanese.
São Paulo has the largest number of Japanese outside Japan. The Japanese
community's historical centre is the Liberdade neighborhood.
· São Paulo is home to the largest Jewish community in Brazil with about 130,000 people.
· There is a considerable number of immigrants from other countries in Latin America,
especially Argentina, Uruguay,
Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile.
· Note that many paulistanos have mixed ethnic origins; the numbers above may count individuals
belonging to multiple groups.

Other sizable groups are: Koreans, Armenians, Lithuanians, Greeks, Syrians and Poles.

Nobody comes to São Paulo for the sightseeing. The ugly urban sprawl that sprang up
in the late 20th century has obliterated almost all vestiges of the colonial town that preceded it,
not to mention the Atlantic rainforest that once covered this and neighbouring states. There are
few historic buildings you would regret having missed.



Sao Paulo's City Hall, Palacio Bandeirantes, where the Pope will meet
with President Lula and other civilian authorities on March 10.

Mosteiro de São Bento
(Monastery of St. Benedict)
Centro




Thhe Pope's home during his stay in Sao Paolo. This unique Norman-Byzantine building constructed between 1910
and 1922 was designed by German architect Richard Berndl. Its enormous organ has some 6,000 pipes, and its Russian
image of the Kasperovo Virgin is covered with 6,000 pearls from the Black Sea. The monastery is known, among other
things for 10 AM Sunday Mass when the monks sing Gregorian chant.



Three historic landmarks are located between one subway stop and the next in the center of the city: San Bento
monastery on the left; Praca da Se where the Cathedral is located, on the right; adn in between, the Patio do
Colegio, marking the site where the city was born.


Catedral da Sé
Square, Centro


The São Paulo Cathedral (Catedral da Sé de São Paulo) in Neo-Gothic style. Construction began
in 1913 and did not end until four decades later. Pope Benedict will meet with the bishops of Brazil
here before he leaves for Aparecida.

Pacaembu Stadium
Praca Charles Miller, Centro


Officially, Estádio Municipal Paulo Machado de Carvalho, owned by the city. Inaugurated in April 1940,
it has a maximum seating capacity of 60,000. The Pope will meet the youth of Brazil at an encounter
here on the evening of May 10.




TWo views of Ibirapuera Park, in the center of the city.


Berrini Avenue, the wall Street of Sao Paulo
.



A typical subway station.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 1.55]

Great Pictures Teresa! "Sampa" is an amazing city!!!
But, Rio de Janeiro is something unique....

================================================================
Dear Nessuna, I totally agree Rio is unique, and how lucky for you to live there!
I had the absolute pleasure of visiting there three years in a row when I was choosing films for a film festival,
and I was stunned.


In terms of geography, there is no city more spectacularly beautiful than Rio! How can you beat that literally breathtaking
combination of sea, the unbelievable stretch of beaches along Avenida Atlantica (truly nothing comparable in the world),
the lagoon, and the mountains and forest literally within city limits? Not to mention a historic center with all the
nostalgic charm one can wish for! Very fitting that Cristo Redentor on Corcovado should preside over all that beauty.
Cape Town, South Africa, has the same beautiful privileged geography, though not as dramatic, and without the wide,
unending beaches, of course (nor a lagoon nor Sugar Loaf!)

I'm not forgetting the favelas - urban slums are the scourge of the Third World - nor the fact that they are right behind
the posh beachside residential areas, but compared to the slums of Calcutta or Bombay, the favelas look far from hopeless...
We could go into a long philosophical discussion at the problem of worldwide poverty - because not even the USA is exempt
from it...So, let's wait what the Holy Father has to say about poverty in Latin America, specifically, and to always
remember the less fortunate in our prayers.

TERESA

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 1.34]

Brazil Episcopal Conference Picks New President


BRASILIA, Brazil, MAY 4, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Archbishop Geraldo Lyrio Rocha of Mariana was elected
the new president of Brazil's episcopal conference. He succeeds Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo.

Archbishop Lyrio, 65, will take on the leadership of Brazil's episcopal conference - which includes
the vice presidency of CELAM, the Latin American bishops' council - at a key moment:
Benedict XVI will visit his country May 13.

The Pope will open the 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Thursday's election also resulted in Archbishop Luiz Soares Vieira, 70, taking the vice presidency.

Archbishop Lyrio told ZENIT that he is "conscious that the responsibility placed on my shoulders
is immense, but I trust a lot in the grace of God."

The prelate said his post "is not an exercise of power, but taking on a role of service in the Church."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 1.57]

Sao Paulo Scenes

Great photos of Sao Paulo, Teresa! The city seems to be a wall of skyscrapers, all light gray.
And what is with that subway station? Where's the graffiti? Where's the dirt?
Makes me want to move there.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 1.57]

I actually found this fantastic panoramic shot of Sao Paulo - which is as wide as you can possibly get it
on one frame, but it is so panoramic I can only post it as a thumbnail. However, if you click it on it once,
you will get it in the size to fit your screen width, and if you click on that image, then you get
the actual size, and you can then scroll right to get the full impact.



Thank you, Carlos Augusto Magalhaes, for making the photo available online.


It's very strange - these days when one thinks one can get most things online, it's not possible to 'construct'
a satisfactory travelog on anything from the pictures available online 95% of the pictures I used for the
Sao Paulo situationer were from the Wikipedia entry. Recently, I could understand if Vigevano did not have
many photos online because in the overall scheme of Italy's 'wonderful towns and cities' [the very first
guidebook I ever bought about Italy was called that] Vigevano is 'minor', but I was surprised that I couldn't
get much more about even far more storied neighbor, Pavia, either.

Online travel guides hardly provide any pictures, and neither do the sites of the cities and municipalities,
not most of those I have had to consult to background the places that the Pope is visiting.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 2.03]

A brief item from Avvenire's online news feed yesterday, 5/5/07, said this:

"There is no particular concern and all the appointments scheduled for the Holy Father in Brazil
are confirmed," Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office said today reacting to reports
that a few cases of dengue fever have been reported in Aparecida.

Dengue is a viral fever transmitted by mosquitoes. The report appeared in the Brazilian newspaper
Jornal do Brasil.

===============================================================

Because I hate having to open a new message box for anything as biased as this report, I am inserting it
into this box as an egregious example of bias getting in the way of reporting by the Reuters correspondent
in Aparecida.


Pope faces Third World challenges
in Brazil trip [DUH! and DUH!!! again]
By Angus MacSwan

APARECIDA, Brazil, May 6 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict, until now a distant figure to Latin America's huge Roman
Catholic population, will come face-to-face with many of the challenges confronting the church when he visits
Brazil this week.

People have left in droves to join Protestant congregations, poverty and violence afflict many households
and birth control is widely practised - indeed Brazil's government hands out free condoms.

And many faithful wonder what are the priorities of Pope Benedict, a conservative theologian best known
in Latin America for clamping down on the leftist Liberation Theology movement.

"The main challenge of the church is to draw a new map - a map of hope. But where is that coming from?," said
Father Jaime Crowe, an Irish priest who has worked for 20 years in the Sao Paulo shantytown of Jardim Angela.

This is the Pontiff's first visit to Latin America since he was elected in April 2005 after the death of the
revered Pope John Paul. Many Latin Americans were disappointed that one of their own cardinals was not chosen.

Pope Benedict, who arrives in Brazil on Wednesday, has focused on reaffirming traditional church doctrine
and customs, and speaking out against birth control, gay rights and what he sees as the collapse of family values.

But the view from the Vatican can contrast with realities of life in Brazil, the world's most populous
Catholic nation, and elsewhere in Latin America.

"It's a very different angle when you are walking in Jardim Angela," said Father Jaime.

The shantytown has many one-parent families, second marriages and teenage pregnancies. Drug and alcohol
addiction is common, and violence is rife.

"How do we reconcile all that with the Gospel and not make people feel excluded?," he said.

A few miles away, 28-year-old Silvana de Jesus was cooking over a fire in a squatter camp where
12,000 people live in tents made of black plastic sheets.

"I think they talk too much and do too little," the unemployed mother-of-five said of church leaders.
"His visit doesn't matter if they don't change their posture with the poor. I myself didn't even know
he was coming."

Pope Benedict will canonise the first Brazilian-born saint during his visit and open a conference
of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Aparecida, site of one of the holiest shrines in the Americas.

His most notable previous mission in Latin America was to discipline priests who followed Liberation
Theology in the 1970s and 1980s, when Marxist-influenced churchmen allied themselves with the poor
against repressive dictatorships.

The issue resurfaced recently when he censured Jon Sobrino, a Spanish priest based in El Salvador
who was involved with the movement.

"We are waiting for the word of the Pope, how he is going to direct us," said Aparecida's Archbishop
Raymundo Damasceno, speaking as workers put a fresh coat of paint on the Bom Jesus Seminary where
the Pope will stay.

"The social question has always been important for us, every time we meet," he added.

In the giant basilica a week before his arrival, pilgrims prayed at the shrine. Ana Maria de Lima Nobre,
47, was visiting from northeastern Natal city, where she runs a school.

Asked what message the Pope should bring, she said: "He must speak about peace, and the violence
we are seeing every day in this country."

However, Pope Benedict is not as popular as his predecessor and excitement about his visit seems muted.
In market stalls stacked with cheap plastic images of saints and other religious souvenirs, Benedict items
were mostly limited to key chains bearing his photo.

One vendor had T-shirts but they were not selling well.

"Everyone says they like the other Pope better, this one lacks charisma," vendor Silvia Maia said.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 2.08]

The Central Office for Church Statistics at the Vatican released these figures recently
in connection with the Pope's trip to Brazil (translated from Italian):


Table 1
Population and ecclesiastical structure

Country population: 184,180,000

Catholics: 155,628,000

Catholics per 100 inhabitants: 84.5

Ecclesiastical distrcicts: 269

Parishes: 9,504

Other pastoral centers: 36,729

Catholics per pastoral center: 3.66


Table 2
Persons engaged in apostolic work

Bishops (as of 3/16/07): 427

Diocesan priests: 10,890

Priests in religious orders: 7,980

Total priests: 18,087

Permanent deacons: 1,759

Religious wno are not priests: 2,676

Total professed religious: 33,765

Lay members of secular institutions: 2,015

Lay missionaries: 72,704

Catechists: 492,370



Table 3
Indicators of pastoral responsibility


Catholics per priest: 8,604

Catholics per pastoral worker: 249

Priest per pastoral center: 0.39

Priests involved in apostolate work per 100 persons: 3


Table 4
Vocations for priesthood

Minor seminarians: 3,858

Major seminarians: 9,450

Major seminarians per 100,000 inhabitants: 5.13

Major seminarians per 100,000 Catholics: 6.07

Major seminarians per 100 priests: 52.25



Table 5
Centers of instruction
owned and/or directed by the Church or religious orders

Schools

- Nurseries and primary grades: 4,450; students 1,698,748

- Intermediate grades and high school: 1,390; students 278,894

- Colleges and universities: 233; students 494,706



Table 6
Social/charitable centers
owned and/or directed by the Church or religious orders

Hospitals: 366

Outpatient centers: 1,013

Leprosaria: 15

Homes for the aged, invalid and minors: 764

Orphanages and asylums: 1,942

Family counselling and other centers for the protection of life: 2,159

Special centers for social education/re-education: 2,830

Other institutions: 1,443

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 2.09]

Courtesy of Lella, here are the live broadcasts scheduled
on Italian TV during the Pope's trip to Brazil next week.



Since CTV is providing the feed to RAI, SAT2000 and Telepace,
this is a reliable guide as well to the CTV online streamcasts.
All times given are Rome time.

There will be no general audiences on May 9,
when the Pope leaves for Brazil, nor on May 16,
when he will just have returned.


Wednesday, May 9
21:15 WELCOME CEREMONY, Guarulhos international airport, Sao Paulo

Thursday, May 10
16:00 COURTESY VISIT to President Lula, Palacio dos Bandeirantes
22:50 ENCOUNTER WITH THE YOUTH, Pacaembu Stadium

Friday, May 11
14:00 HOLY MASS AND CANONICATION RITES, Campo di Marte
21:00 meeting with brazilian bishops, Catedral da Se

Saturday, May 12
15:30 VISIT TO FAZENDA DA ESPERANCA, Guaratingueta
22:50 HOLY ROSARY with the clergy and faithful, Basilica of Aparecida

Sunday, May 13
14:30 HOLY MASS AT THE SANCTUARY OF APARECIDA
20:50 INAUGURAL SESSION of the V General Conference
of Latin American and Caribbean Bishops, Aprecida convention center

Monday, May 14
00:30 DEPARTURE CEREMONY, Guarulhos international airport, Sao Paulo

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 2.11]

Click on any of these links here and you will get to the site of GLOBO-TV, which has a wealth
of video-clips already, on preparations for the Pope's visit, and besides the video indicated
on the link, you will see on the right side of your screen, a list of more videos.

I have not figured out how to get the complete list, but I find that if I change video, the list
on the right also changes (there are overlaps and repetitions but there also new ones, so just
keep trying them all - they're all brief and every interesting even if you don't understand Portuguese).

The video on the Benedictine monastery is super!!!

PAGING RUSSI -Please start archiving this material!


video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM626704-7823-MOSTEIRO+DE+SAO+BENTO+EM+SAO+PAULO+VAI+HOSPEDAR+O+PAPA+BENTO+XVI...

video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM662113-7823-PRESENTE+ESPECIAL+PARA+O+PAPA+BENTO+XVI...

video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM666025-7823-UMA+SOPA+PARA+BENTO+XVI...

video.globo.com/Videos/Player/Noticias/0,,GIM664859-7823-BENTO+XVI+LANCA+O+PRIMEIRO+LIVRO+COMO+PAPA...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 2.12]

Yesterday, Reuters filed two stories from Brazil about the Pope's coming visit. The first one was
a very biased story that I tucked into one of the posts above (the one on dengue fever). That story
comes today with Reuters photos on the Yahoo news service of a demonstration by squatters near
Sao Paolo who invaded a private piece of land to dramatize their plight.

The other story is about the cathedral at Aparecida. Much of what it reports is already known to
those of you who have been following this thread, but it's good to recap it:

Brazil's giant basilica
is backdrop for Pope visit


APARECIDA, Brazil, May 6 (Reuters) - The Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida, Latin America's
most popular shrine and one of the world's largest cathedrals, will be the main backdrop for
Pope Benedict's visit to Brazil this week.

Every year millions of Brazilian and foreign pilgrims visit the shrine, in the city of Aparecida
about 100 miles east (south!) of Brazil's biggest city Sao Paulo.

Its story dates back to 1717 when three fishermen having a run of bad luck cast their nets in
the River Paraiba and dragged up a headless statue of the Virgin Mary. They also salvaged
the head and, according to the legend, then netted plenty of fish.

Neighbors began to venerate the statue, which came to be known as Our Lady of Aparecida,
and a cult grew. The first chapel was built in 1745.

A larger church was built between 1834 and 1888 and is now known as the Old Basilica following
the construction of a gigantic new cathedral.

Work on the new structure began in 1955 and was inaugurated by Pope John Paul in 1980.
Shaped like a Greek Cross, the red-brick building is the world's second-biggest
basilica after St. Peter's in Vatican City.

The dome reaches 230 feet in height and the basilica's total area is 193,800 square feet
(18,000 square meters). It can hold 45,000 worshipers.

Over the years a town sprang up around the religious sites. It now relies heavily on tourism.

One of the most popular attractions is the Sala das Promessas (Hall of Promises), where people
leave objects ranging from motorcycle helmets to guns to wax body parts either to ask or give
thanks for the saint's help in overcoming illness, accidents or other hardships.

Sections of the parking lot, which can hold 10,000 cars and buses, are named after Jesus's
disciples.

There is also a Pilgrims' Shopping Mall within its grounds with 700 shops selling religious
souvenirs and trinkets. The food court includes a McDonald's and a Sanctuary of the Apostles
Barbecue and Beer.

Our Lady of Aparecida was named Brazil's national saint in 1930. About 100,000 people
usually attend services in Aparecida commemorating her every October 12.

================================================================

The CELAM site has just made aerial pictures of the basilica available, which allows us
to better appreciate its size and its location with respect to the rest of the city.



It has entrances on all four sides, but this is considered the front. The altar for the papal Mass
is being built right in front of the main entrance.

The next four view are taken from the 'rear':










These were taken this weekend as the outdoor stage and altar
for the Papal Mass was being constructed:

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 21.24]

Monsignor Scherer wrote this article in Portuguese for the papal visit site of the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo weeks before he was named by pope Benedisct XVI to be the Archbishop of Sao Paulo, succeeding Cardinal Claudio Hummes who is now in the Roman Curia. Until last week's elections, Mons. Scherer was also secretary-general of the Brazilian bishops conference. He wrote this article in that capacity.


Frei Galvão:
Disciple and Missionary of Jesus Christ
By Dom Odilo Scherer


The news of the canonization of the devout Frei (Father/Friar) Antônio Sant'Ana Galvão, the first native-born Brazilian saint, was received with great joy in our country.

Usually, canonizations are made by the Pope, in Rome. This time, however, Benedict XVI made an exception and will canonize Frei Galvão in São Paulo, during the Mass which will be celebrated at Campo de Marte on May 11 of this year.

In fact, the Brazilian bishopric, during the General meeting of 2005, in Itaici, had signed a letter asking Pope Benedict the XVI to canonize Friar Galvão during his visit to Brazil. When he received the request from the hands of the President of the Brazilian bishops conference, the Pope immediately agreed, observing that the canonization would be in full accord with the theme of the V General Conference of the Latin American and Caribbean Bishopric.

Aparecida's Conference, which will be opened by the Pope on May 13, proposes a reflection on Christianity and the Church's historical, cultural, social and religious context in our time and among the people of Latin America. Who are we and what do we do in society? The Conference theme points to this direction: We are disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ and our presence among the people should be significant, helping them to have a full life through Christ's Gospel.

Frei Galvão lived at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. He died in 1822, the year Brazil gained its Independence. He had wanted to be a Jesuit but ended up being a Franciscan.

In São Paulo, he was devoted to prayer, to intense work, to preaching, to popular missions and to charity. He welcomed all people and had special attention for the poor, the sick and the afflicted. He undertook several positions of responsibility in his religious community. He was a 'man of God' and endeavored to help people to be closer to God. Therefore, already in life, he was worshipped by the people, who appealed to him in their countless needs.

He founded Santa Clara convent, in Sorocaba, at a time when the law imposed enormous restrictions on Church initiatives. He rolled up his sleeves and he himself helped to build Luz Monastery in São Paulo, where today the nuns of the religious Congregation that he founded still live.

The church attached to the monastery, in the historical center of São Paulo capital, also has his grave, which has always been a focus for people's devotion.

Usually, religiosity and popular curiosity regard saints chiefly to find 'evidence' in their 'miracles', and look to the saints for graces and celestial favors. The Catholic Church doesn't consider that wrong, but reminds the faithful that miracles do not make a saint.

In the canonization process, it is verified strictly if the person lived a sacred life. That is fundamental, because the Church does not "sanctify" anybody, but it just recognizes and attests the sanctity of somebody. A miracle is looked at only in the final phase of beatification and canonization, as a special grace and divine confirmation of the candidate's sanctity.

In fact, the saints don't make miracles; only God does. We say, then, that the miracle is obtained by the saints' intercession, and not by a power that they themselves have.

The saints are great friends of God and, at the same time, our friends. They were, in this life, and continue to be beyond, close to God. They were and continue to be men and women of God; people realize that and it appeals to them, for a thousand reasons.

Saints are not gods, nor should they be confused with "smaller divinities in the celestial pantheon." That has never been Christianity's teaching nor the Church's. There is only one God, and He is not substituted by any saint. But He is surrounded by a host of His children and servants, happy and thankful to have reached their life's objective, and wanting to help their brothers on earth to get there too.

In the Church, the saints help us better understand the spiritual wealth of the kingdom of God and the multiform sanctity of God Himself. Therefore, a sacred person also helps others to get closer to God.

Many times, the saints were in life already the objects of attention and adoration; but the true saints know better.
Saint Pio of Pietrelcina used to be irritated whenever anyone got close to him and tried to cut off a piece of his clothing to take as a relic - he would order the offender to confess and do penance.

When the Church canonizes a saint, it is saying that that person, certainty, is close to God. Therefore it allows us to appeal for his/her intercession and render adoration. In calling attention to the lives of the saints, the Church invites everyone to praise God for what His grace has accomplished in those brothers or sisters, and invites us to imitate the saints' examples, to ask for their intercession, before God, when needed. And the saint, extending his hand answers: Courage, my brother, and my sister, be strong in your faith, follow Jesus' example, live according to God's commandments and always do good!

Saint Frei Galvão, pray for us! Saint Sister Paulina, Devout Priest Anchieta and all the blessed brothers and sisters, happy disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, intercede before God for us! Amen.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 21.23]

Brazil, world's biggest Catholic country,
to get its first native-born saint
By Jack Chang
McClatchy Newspapers



BRASILIA, Brazil - As her 8-year-old son, Enzzo, played on the balcony
of her apartment, Sandra Grossi de Almeida held up an X-ray picture
that she said proved that his very existence was a miracle.



The chemist pointed to a black wedge that she said was a wall of tissue dividing her uterus,
a malformation that should have made it impossible for her to carry a baby for more than four
months. Yet Enzzo grew for seven months in a space about half the size of a normal uterus until
he was delivered by Caesarean section.



Grossi de Almeida attributes the miracle of her son's birth to a paper "pill" inscribed with
a prayer that she ate during her pregnancy. The Vatican agrees, pronouncing Enzzo one of the
two miracles needed to declare the creator of the pills, an 18th-century Franciscan monk
named Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvao, a saint.


Mural at the Convent of Light in Sao Paulo, main shrine to Frei Galvao.

The May 11 canonization of Galvao, Brazil's first native-born saint, will be the centerpiece
event when Pope Benedict XVI visits Brazil. Many say it also will be a watershed in the Roman
Catholic Church's battle to fight the loss of adherents to fast-growing Pentecostal churches.



Galvao's pills reportedly have cured thousands of Brazilians of everything from depression to
hepatitis. His elevation to sainthood will be long-delayed recognition of what many believe
is an ongoing miracle that's saved - or bettered - lives for more than two centuries.


People wait to receive the miraculous "pills" at the Convent of Light in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Galvao's pills contain this prayer: "After the birth, the Virgin remained intact /
Mother of God, intercede on our behalf." They're assembled in five locations around Sao Paulo
state, including by women in Galvao's hometown of Guaratingueta, who gather every
afternoon in a room above the local cathedral. The pills also are made by cloistered nuns
at the Convent of Light in Sao Paulo, where Galvao died in 1832 at age 83.

Believers swallow three seed-sized pills over nine days, during which they recite the prayer
printed on the paper.

"It's a vehicle of faith," said Grossi de Almeida, who miscarried twice, including losing twins,
before Enzzo was born. "You take the pills, and you believe in them, you believe they will make
you better, and you become stronger in your faith. You know there's a God that helps you."

On a recent afternoon, Maria Carolina da Ressurreicao and her husband traveled hours inland
to Guaratingueta from their home on the coast to pick up packets of the pills, which are free,
though donations are welcome.

"We've always lived with Friar Galvao and his pills," said da Ressurreicao, who has circulatory
problems and whose husband is recovering from a heart attack. "We've always asked for
his help, and he's always come through."

The canonization will cap more than two decades of advocacy by nun Celia Cadorin and other
Brazilian church officials who've trumpeted Galvao's story.

The church requires saints to have performed two miracles, and the process of proving them,
always after the saint's death, can take centuries. Special cases, such as the ongoing
beatification of Pope John Paul II, can be expedited.

The Vatican confirmed the monk's first miracle in 1998, the case of 4-year-old Daniela
Cristina da Silva, who reportedly was cured of crippling hepatitis in 1990 after eating
one of the monk's pills.


Daniela Cristina da Silva and her mother Jacira Francisco da Silva stand outside the Convent
of Light (Mosteiro da Luz) in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The monk's second proven miracle - Grossi de Almeida's successful pregnancy - was declared
last December, clearing his path to sainthood.

Cadorin said she picked the two cases out of nearly 24,000 miracles attributed to the monk
because they were the best documented and most inexplicable.

"It was a very scientific process," Cadorin said. "We had to interview witnesses, talk to
doctors and scientists, and document everything. You have to really prove that, scientifically,
the events were impossible."

The church sent Grossi de Almeida to have sonographic images made of her uterus to confirm
that it was divided in half. Shown an X-ray image of the uterus by a McClatchy reporter,
a Brazilian obstetrician confirmed that the 37-year-old would have been unable to carry
a fetus past the fourth month of pregnancy.

Cadorin sent Da Silva for tests of her blood, urine and feces as well as sonographic imaging
to confirm that she'd recovered from advanced hepatitis A.

"There was no medical cure for Daniela in her condition," said the girl's mother, Jacira
Francisco, who was interviewed at the Convent of Light, which Galvao designed and helped build.
"She shouldn't have recovered the way she did."

Skeptics of religion, however, have questioned the process's science.

"Every time someone gets healed and they don't know why, they say it must be God,"
said Daniel Sottomaior, the vice president of the Round Earth Society, a group of Brazilian
scholars who cast a skeptical eye on such phenomena.

"They change the name from ignorance to God. Why not say it was the big alien or the unicorn
or the leprechaun?"

Galvao's pills also have had their detractors within the church. Aloisio Lorscheider,
an outspoken former archbishop of Aparecida, a neighboring city to Guaratingueta, called the
pill's use "superstition" and prohibited the region's nuns from producing them. The nuns
continued to make the pills despite the order.

"I consider it even ridiculous that, in the evolved and progressive days in which
we live, there are still people who pursue this," Lorscheider said in a 1998 interview
with the newspaper Vale do Paraiba. Lorscheider, now 82, retired in 2004 in poor health,
and efforts to interview him were unsuccessful.

Galvao's story, at least as told by church lore, is full of scientifically inexplicable events.

The monk started the tradition of the pills in the late 18th century when he wrote
his famous prayer on three pieces of paper in Sao Paulo and asked a woman who was having
a difficult pregnancy to eat them. She reportedly went on to give birth to a healthy child.
Demand for the pills surged.


Volunteers work in shifts to prepare the 'pills'.

The monk's devotees believe that his miraculous powers didn't stop there. They say
he levitated while praying, was able to appear in two places at once, could read minds
and could witness events where he wasn't physically present.

For more than 150 years, women around Guaratingueta have passed around a worn-out rope
that's believed to have been the monk's belt, tying it around their waists during
childbirth for good luck.



People also have chipped off pieces of marble from the walls of the Convent of Light and
steeped them in water, which they've drunk like tea.

"This whole emphasis on magic and practical remedies for everyday problems is
a very Brazilian approach to religion," popular religions expert Lisias Nogueira Negrao said.
"In a country where a great part of people live in poverty, they look for this dimension
of magic that can help them just survive. They're less worried about big issues such as
morality."

The main question for many Catholics is whether the canonization can revive a church
that's lost millions of people to the country's growing Pentecostal congregations.
While 125 million Brazilians identified themselves as Catholic in a 2000 census, Brazil
became the world's biggest Pentecostal country last year.

The monk's boosters said they were confident that his canonization would reverse that trend.

"Today, with a Brazilian saint and the pope coming, it's a new life for the Catholic Church,"
said Tom Maia, a distant nephew of the monk who's opened two museums about him
in Guaratingueta and been a leading advocate for his canonization.

"What's happened over the years is with our numeric strength, we Catholics have become
too comfortable and we've lost people. But the Brazilian church is waking up."

Nogueira Negrao, however, said he doubted that the canonization would end the church's slide.

"The Catholic Church in Brazil developed very independently, without the presence of
the institutions," he said. "There are parts of Brazil where a priest comes by once a year,
so people have developed their own way of worshiping."

Nonetheless, devotion to Galvao is surging before the pope's visit, and tens of thousands
of his pills are being hand-made and distributed every day.

At the Convent of Light, dozens of faithful show up every day seeking divine help.

"Sometimes, they've been all we've had when there wasn't any money for medicines,"
said Maria Cicera da Silva, 54, who was picking up pills for a cousin. "Faith can do a lot,
and I have a lot of faith."


The house in Guaratingueta, Brazil where Frei Galvao was born has become a museum documenting his life.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 2.56]

I'll put in here any news briefs and stray information during the day about the visit....


From the Papal visit site of the Archdiocese of Sao Paulo:

3200 journalists have applied for accreditation to cover the Papal visit - mostly from Latin America
and Europe. The number has exceeded expectations, organizers said.

***



The Brazilian Post Office will issue a commemorative stamp of the Pope's visit on May 10, with
the launching ceremony to be held at the Palacio dos Bandeirantes when the Pope meets Brazilian
President Lula on May 10.

The stamp has a face value of 0.90 riais (about 45 US cents) and will have a first printing of 2.04 million.

***

Here's an item we briefly reported about earlier when it was referenced in a story, at which time I found out
I could not access the FIDES stories without being a subscriber. Here is the item, courtesy of Curt Jester:

Río de Janeiro (Agenzia Fides) - According to a report issued by the Getulio Vargas Foundation although
in the 1990s Brazil saw a drastic decline in its Catholic population, the soul drain has stopped
and the numbers have remained at a stable 73.79% registered in 2003.

The report was issued a week before the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI who will make a 4 day visit
to the country from 9-13 May. Brazil has the largest Catholic population in the world although the Church
has lost numerous members.

In 2000 there were 125.53 million Catholics in 2003 the number had risen to 129.76 million and t
he Foundation says today Brazilian Catholics number around 139.24 million.

The report, Study on Religions: Recent Changes, is based on statistics supplied by the Brazilian Institute
of Geography and Statistics in 2003 compared with those which emerged from a recent population count.

The report said the number of Catholics in Brazil between 1991 and 2000 dropped from 83,34% to 73,89%.
In 1940, Catholics were 95.01% of the population and then diminished gradually: 93.48% in 1950,
93.07% in 1960, 91.77% in 1970, 88.96% in 1980 and 83.34% in 1991.

On the contrary the percentage of evangelical Christians and new churches has grown: from 6.6% in 1980
to 9% in 1991 and 16.2% in 2000. The report says that although in Brazil there are 4.7 Catholics to
one evangelical Christian the number of evangelical pastors is 3.7 times higher than that of Catholic
pastoral workers (priests and religious): in other words there are 17.9 more evangelical pastors
per believer than Catholic pastoral workers.

The report says that Catholics are more concentrated in rural areas where 19.7% of the members of
the Church live. The number of Catholics is higher among adults. Whereas 73.79% of the population
in general declares itself Catholic, the percentage rises to 77.53% among adults over 60.

NB: Compare the numbers - insofar as total numebr of Catholics - between the Foundation report
based on a 2003 Brazilian national survey and the Vatican's estimate cited a few posts above based
on its statistics as of 12/31/05.


Brazilian president has extraordinary words
for the role of the church in Brazil


VATICAN CITY, May 7 (PETRUS) - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva says that he will discuss the social
problems facing Brazil when he meets with Pope Benedict XVI on May 10.

Lula said in a radio interview that "the Church plays an important role" in Brazil's social policies.

"I spent a great deal of my life working directly or indirectly with movements linked to the Church in the task
of creating a society that is more just in Brazil," said Lula, a leading labor leader before he entered politics.

"Some of the social policies that I have been pursuing as President," he continued, "were the results of
what I learned during my work with the church-linked movements. We have very good relations
(with the Church). We respect the autonomy of the Church, and the Church respects the autonomy
of the State."

Lula praised his friend, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, who was Archbishop of Sao Paulo until he was named
to head the Cognregation of the Clergy a few months ago. He said he was his 'companion and associate'
in efforts to carry out themission of the Church to aid "the poorest, the most oprresed in this country
and in the rest of the world" and had led "the active participation of the Brazilian church
in the war against poverty."

Lula concluded; "The Church has an extraordinary role in Latin America - not only to evangelize, but
more important, to raise the consciousness and conscience of every person."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 3.02]

PETRUS correspondent Bruno Volpe in Latin America reports:


Emmanuel Milingo, excommunicated Bishop of Lusaka, has turned up in Aparecida after establishing
in Sao Paulo a branch of 'Married Priests Now.'

Milingo, whose activities are being financed by the Korean sect of the Reverend Moon, has scheduled
meetings with Liberation Theology priests on the subject of married clergy before and after
the Pope's visit.

Members of his entourage said the timing was 'merely cpincidental.'

Milingo has said he does not recognize his excommunication. His reputation for exorcism may gain him
widespread attention in Brazil where African voodoo sects are popular and where folk religion holds
many elements of superstition.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 3.03]

This interview appeared in the Sunday edition of Avvenire, 5/6/07, but as they do not put this online
till Monday, hence the delay. Here is a translation.

'Other than poverty, the Church
in Latin America must deal with
Protestant sects, abortion
and secularization'
By Gianni Cardinale


"The Brazilians, and Latin Americans in general, always have warm affection for the Pope. They would
always welcome a Pope with joy and a great desire to hear him and pray with him. It happened with
John Paul II on his many trips there, and I am sure it is the same for Benedict XVI."

Cardinal Claudo Hummes looks with great hope at this first pastoral visit of Benedict XVI to Latin
America which starts Wednesday, May 9, in Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city and world's second largest
metropolis today after Tokyo.

Until the Pope named him Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy a few months ago, Hummes was
Archbishop of Sao Paulo. Avvenire requested this interview.

Your Eminence, what is the ecclesial and social reality which awaits the Pope
in Brazil, and more generally, in Latin America?

Above all, the Pope is coming to Latin America to confirm the church in Sao Paolo, the churches in Brazil,
and in all of Latin America in the faith.

Our church, thank God, is alive and very active. Our nations have not yet reached the degree of
secularization that is evident in Europe. But in the higher classes, among intellectuals, in the
academic world and in the media, and in some political circles, an anti-clerical and anti-religious
mentality has started to become more diffuse - this desire to relegate faith to nothing more than
a private matter without relevance in the public space.


During the Bishops' Synod in 2005, you expressed great alarm over the spread
of Protestant sects in Latin America, and asked whether the continent would
remain Catholic in the future. Are you that pessimistic?
I was not and am not a pessimistic person, just a realist. Even if the last studies say that the phenomenon
has abated, it is a fact that the Pentecostal sects in the past few decades have eroded the religious
compactness of Latin America, Brazil in particular, countries which were at one time almsot 100%
Catholic. In Brazil today, only 70% declare themselves to be Catholic.

What could the Pope say to counteract this phenomenon?
We expect a very strong stimulus for a sense of mission in the Church. The church in Latin America should
get out of the parishes and seek out everyone: those who were baptized Catholics but who have since
forgotten about the Church, or whom the Church has forgotten, the Catholics who have been ensnared
by the Protestant sects, the non-Catholics.

The Church should return to addressing itself to everyone, but it should seek out the people
in their homes and where they work - you can't expect them to come back on their own.

The Church should promote personal encounters between these people and the people of Christ.

The fact that Latin America suffers from a chronic shortage of priests doesn't help...
That is true. Obviously, it would be good if we had enough priests, and we always pray to the Lord
that this may happen. But missionary work does not only mean the clergy or permanent deacons;
above all, it should involve the lay faithful. Every Catholic by virtue of Baptism is and should
be a missionary.

I believe the Pope will remind the lay faithful of our Continent of this great responsibility.
And I hope that the Conference in Aparecida will launch the initative already proposed by CELAM
(the organization called Conference of Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean).

Which is?
That of a great continental mission in all of our geographical area, from Tierra del Fuego
(extreme southern islands of Latin America) to Mexico and beyond, considering that millions
of Latin Americans now live in the United States.

This is a mission that should be permanent in character, not the 10-12 days of the people's missions
of old.


Discussions in the last general conferences were monopolized in effect by issues
related to the so-called liberation theology. Do you think the same thing will
happen this year?
I don't think so. I believe that liberation theology, the authentic one, according to the criteria
indicated by John paul II, brought positive elements that were valuable to the Magisterium. Of course,
there are still groups who would like to stress its more ideological aspects, but we are speaking
here of a minority fringe who will not be represented in Aparecida, even if these perennial
dissidents will probably be very much present in the mass media.

It's a different question about the poor.

Namely?
Ideology is one thing. Actual poverty is something concrete that is still too widespread in Latin America.
I don't doubt that the Pope will remind everyone of the serious duty of the Church to work among
the poor and for the poor, according to the social doctrine of the Church.


Another fact that appears to emerge from the ecclesial debates on Latin America is
the so-called theology of the Indian...
It is a reality that I am less familiar with. In some countries, there are groups who are militant
about it, but in Brazil, the phenomenon is minimal. Even in this case, we should separate fact from ideology.
Any theological reflection that is considered necessary about the plight of the Indians [native inhabitants
of the continent, not admixed with any European blood] should be carried on in full consonance with
the authentic Magisterium of the Church, especially with that of the Holy Father.

What is important is solidarity with the Indians to promote their integral humanity and their culture
alongside their evangelization.

You referred to the secularization that is starting to make itself felt in Latin America?
What are its characteristics?
Among the educated classes and in the leadership group, they think that the Church has too strong
a grip on society and that the State should be secular. The Church itself says in Gaudium et spes
that the State should be secular. But the State in Latin America should take into account that
it is serving a population that is for the most part religious. The State is not the master
of the people, it is there to serve the people. In Latin America, the states are in the
service of peoples who are religious and who want to live according to their religious values.

But some intellectuals and polticians are not promoting a healthy secularization but rather one
that is anti-religious. They find allies in this from those circles and lobbies in the scientific
world who want to have a free hand in the most sensitive issues like biotechnology.

In Brazil as well as in other Latin American countries, there is now a move to legalize
abortion. Do you think the Pope will refer to this in his speeches?
That attempt has been going on for some time in Brazil. The church is obviously against it. I do not
doubt that Pope Benedict XVI, like Pope John Paul II did in the past, will address this issue in strong
and clear terms, recalling the consistent teaching of the Magisterium.

Latin America has been called the continent of hope. Is it?
Latin America is not only the continent of hope - it is also vitally crucial to the universal Church today,
because it makes up half of world Catholicism. This may not please some people, but it is a fact.
The church now has a lively presence there, but we also want it to have a future, and that is why we
talk of this great mission - we want to continue being a Catholic continent.

The Pope will also be canonizing the first Brazilian-born saint, Fr. Antonio Galvao.
How important is this?
It is a historic event with very relevant implications. Frei Galvao was a Franciscan who worked for
the poor and for social peace in Sao Paulo in his time. These two aspects make him very close to us today.
Our society continues to have poor people: the globalization of markets and the new liberal economics have
increased unemployment dramatically. And our society needs the peace that Frei Galvao preached - because
now our large cities are infested with endemic urban violence that is fanned by organized crime and by
drug trafficking.

Eminence, was it really the Pope who decided that the fifth General Conference be held
in Aparecida?
I remember very well when he made the decision. After the Bishops Synod ended in 2005, some Latin American
cardinals saw him in private audience. Besides myself, there were Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires,
Cardinal Errasuriz Ossa of Chile, and Cardinal Majella Agnello of Salvador de Bahia (Brazil).

We expressed to the Pope our strong desire that the conference be held in Latin America [ NB: When it was
originally being planned, John Paul II was still alive, and because he could no longer travel, it was decided to hold it in Rome.].

The Pope replied with great spontaneity: "Then let's do it in Aparecida, and I will come." I myself was very
surprised because Brazil had already hosted a general conference, the first. But he made the choice, and
I couldn't be happier.

Avvenire, 6 maggio 2007

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 3.42]

koerazym.org reports an interview given by the new Archbishop of Sao Paulo to FIDES news agency:

With the Pope,
to rediscover
the joy of faith
by Mattia Bianchi

The new Archbishop of Sao Paulo, Mons. Odilo Scherer, sees the Pope's visit to Brazil as an occasion
for renewal in the face of all the challenges faced by the Catholic Church in Latin America.

"We need to reflect and have a new consciousness of who we are and what it is that we have to
offer the world today," Scherer said in an interview with FIDES News agency a few days after he was
installed on April 29 as Archbishop of Sao Paulo, successor to Cardinal Claudio Hummes.

"I expect the Church in Latin America to receive a great new impulse towards missionary dynamism
and action," he said, "so that Catholics may profoundly feel the joy of believing and of being united
to the Catholic Church, so that the lay faithful may be helped to carry out missionary work within
the Church and to the world, with dynamism and competence. And that this will bear visible and
abundant fruit in the lives of the people."

What are the challenges? Archbishop Scherer underscores "poverty and social exclusion, which is
persistent and even more accentuated these days...urban violence...the economic and cultural implications
of globalization... changes in the religious picture such as the migration of the faithful from our church
to other Christian groups...the commercialization of religion in what has become to be thought of as a
'market of religions'...and new ethical problems."

Not forgetting, he says, that the Church must also provide solid ground for Catholics to belong to the
Church, especially in the large cities, "in an environment characterized by mobility, precariousness,
instability of human relations, and failure to relate to traditional institutions."

These are the realities which the fifth General Conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops will
confront when they meet in Aparecida on the theme "Disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, so they
may have life in Him".

Archbishop Scherer said the discussions would focus on three thigns: "The Christian and Catholic identity,
the mission of Catholics in the world, and a sense of the presence and actions of Christians and
the Church among the people."

He explained: "In the major cultural changes taking place everywhere, the authentic Christian message
for a way of life becomes diluted or poorly characterized. Therefore, it is right to go back to the message -
Jesus Christ and His Gospel - to show
what it means in the daily life of people. The challenges of our times require new missionary openness
of the whole Church towards the rest of the world."

Proper formation, he said, of Catholics and pastoral workers, is an answer to the activity of Protestant sects.

"We can no longer suppose that every Catholic is properly 'evangelized' and that all we need to do
is to keep what we already have. Our nation, the dioceses and the parishes, our families, are continuously
tempted by numerous 'other propositions' of religion and of a way of life. And so, the Church wants to see
every Catholic rediscover a sense of mission, individually or working with organizations, not in
competition with the sects, but simply complying with our mission as Catholics."

Therefore, he says, bishops should not be above the difficulties experienced by their flock,
"because the Church must continue to be a significant presence in the social, historical, political,
economic and cultural realities of our people."

"The Church in Latin America," he points out, "has something to say to the peoples of the continent,
to its institutions and to its cultures: how people can live according to the plan of God, regardless
of ideology, economic theory or political party."

He is optimistic about the outcome of the Aparecida conference, but he emphasizes that "formation and
affirmation of the Catholic identity begins with basic Christian formation, to intense evangelical
action, catechesis and prayer formation, and most of all, active testimony of the presence and action
of the Church in the lives of people and in society."

In a word, Scherer says, "to help the faithful rediscover the joy of believing, of being Christian."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 3.25]

I like the way the Brazilians create a new poster for every occasion of this papal visit! This one was to advertise a campaign of prayers for the success of the Papal visit adn teh Bishops' Conference. From the CELAM site.




They also prepared a banner in various sizes in case on your website you may want
to tag the Prayer that Pope Benedict wrote especially for the confrence (we have it
on the previous page of this thread, so I'll go in and add the banner there, as well!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 0.46]

The Archdiocese site for the papal visit has actually modified its banner to incorporate 'Sao Paulo ti acolhe'
(Sao Paulo welcomes you) in the posters on the Canonization Mass, but they have not provided for it to be downloaded.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 3.28]

In the interest of consolidating all Brazil-related pieces together - I am re-posting here two articles posted 5/7/07
in NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT - the first one, from AP was posted by Andrea. I added the Reuters item to her post afterwards.

================================================================

Another biased report on the upcoming visit this week
However, there are some well-known truths in there:

Pope visits Brazil, church loses ground

By ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press Writer

SAO PAULO, Brazil - Pope Benedict XVI is heading to the world's most populous Roman Catholic country at a time
when evangelical Christians are packing converted storefronts and cavernous churches every Sunday, thrusting
their Bibles in the air.

Benedict will try to halt that wave of Protestant fervor during his first trip to Brazil. Aiming to energize
its more than 120 million Catholics, Benedict will canonize the country's first native saint, hold Masses that
could attract millions and open a conference of Latin American bishops in the holy shrine of Aparecida.

Few believe the five-day papal visit, which begins Wednesday, will reverse the flight of Catholics who have
abandoned the church to become Protestants — or who simply stopped attending Mass amid profound societal
change.

Nearly half the world's 1 billion Catholics live in Latin America, but Pentecostal churches are enjoying
explosive growth, promising divine intervention to lift parishioners from lives of misery in a region
where the divide between rich and poor is among the worst on the planet.

Brazil's census shows the percentage of citizens characterizing themselves as Catholics plunged from 89 percent
in 1980 to 74 percent in 2000, while those calling themselves evangelical Protestants rose from 7 percent
to 15 percent.

A study released last week by Brazil's respected Getulio Vargas Foundation indicated the Catholic decline stabilized
from 2000 to 2003, but also showed the percentage of Protestants continued to rise.

Sao Paulo's former Catholic archbishop, Claudio Hummes, told reporters the losses are "a hemorrhage, and
it's not over."

"It is due to the expansionism of Protestant sects that attract an ever-larger number of baptized Catholics, but
also to moral relativism, imported from Europe and introduced on the continent above all by the local ruling
classes, the mass media and the intellectuals," said Hummes, now prefect of the Vatican's Congregation
for Bishops.[the Clergy! - check your facts, at least!]

The Vatican's Latin American leaders also struggle with a host of secular issues, including Brazil's free
distribution of condoms to combat AIDS, a rise in second marriages not recognized by the church and
Mexico City's move to legalize abortion.

"The Catholic Church faces not only competition but losses in Latin America," said Fernando Segovia, professor
of theology at Vanderbilt University's Divinity School. "This has to be foremost in Benedict's mind, combined
with a severe shortage of clergy. You put those two things together and you have a rather difficult situation
for Rome to handle."

Many wonder whether Benedict will be able to make a difference, especially since the church's situation worsened
in Latin America despite frequent visits by his beloved predecessor, John Paul II.

"He was the pilgrim pope, who went to Latin America as a conquering hero, but for all John Paul's
popularity, things grew worse over his tenure," said former Vatican radio reporter David Gibson. The new pope
"is 80 years old, and he's not John Paul in his early days.
Benedict is an older man, a theologian, a man
of words rather than presence and action."

Some also see the German-born Benedict as out of touch with the developing world, an image Vatican spokesman
Federico Lombardi has tried to counter by emphasizing the pope's concern for problems ranging from poverty
and debt to the fight against arms trafficking. "It's not true that he's 'Eurocentric' as some claim,"
Lombardi said.

But many Brazilians still follow the liberation theology movement Benedict moved to crush when he was
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and they remember well that he labeled their work a Marxist heresy.

While the church's hierarchy in Rome has pressured Catholic priests around the world to stay out of politics,
these Brazilians have remained defiant: more than 60,000 ecclesiastic base communities have been
instrumental in educating poor people, union organizers and most of the leaders of the Landless Rural
Workers' Movement, Brazil's most radical squatter group.

In the lawless Amazon rainforest, Catholic priests, nuns and lay people work tirelessly to organize poor
settlers to stand up for their rights. The most prominent was Dorothy Stang, an American nun killed in 2005
while trying to settle poor farmers on an area ranchers wanted for development.

Brazil's bishops have tried recently to promote a middle ground — lobbying the government for better
working conditions for sugarcane cutters and to eliminate the virtual slavery of workers in the Amazon.
But many Brazilian Catholics remain bitter over the Vatican's treatment of the movement's leaders.

The conservative Protestant churches don't engage in social activism, but religious experts say they do better
than the traditional Catholic church at meeting the basic needs of poor Brazilians.

The Protestant congregations "tend to generate a very strong sense of community with a much higher
percentage of Pentecostals who participate in small activities like Bible study, outreach, providing
financial help, finding jobs," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

At a Sunday service in the massive God and Love Pentecostal Church that looms over several elevated
Sao Paulo highways, thousands of blue-collar workers and their children waved their hands, shouting
"Hallelujah!" and spontaneously speaking in tongues as pastors promised Jesus would solve their earthly
problems and guarantee them passage to heaven.

Hundreds stuffed money into small envelopes, checking boxes requesting prayers to give them jobs, prosperity
or health.

Less than a mile away, several hundred mostly middle-aged and elderly Catholics sat in the Our Lady of
Consolation church amid ornate stained glass windows and pews hewn decades ago from Brazilian hardwood.

They dutifully rose to recite the rosary and sing hymns, then sat in silence as a priest urged them to seek
salvation by being obedient sheep in God's flock.

AP writer Victor Simpson contributed to this report from Vatican City.

===============================================================

Let me add the Reuters story here - the second one yesterday, after the report from their correspondent
in Aparecida, equally negative. Cassandra is what the MSM have chosen to be for this trip. With 500 million
adherents [no other faith comes close] - despite obvious problems -that's a shaky future? The Church has
been alive there for five centuries. Let us see how long the sects will last!


Pope to face shaky Church future
in Latin America
By Philip Pullella


VATICAN CITY, May 7 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict on Wednesday starts his first trip to Latin America, where
a Church that is home to nearly half of the world's Catholics faces an uncertain future and falling numbers.

The May 9-14 trip to Brazil, the most populous Catholic country, will also be a personal challenge to
the Pope, who is still associated with crackdowns on Liberation Theology in the 1980s when he was Cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger.

The trip's main purpose is to make a keynote address in the city of Aparecida to open a major conference
of Latin American bishops, who will discuss strategy for the Church.

As the Latin American Church looks at its future, one main question will be why it is losing tens of millions
of members to protestant sects such as Evangelicals and Pentecostalists.

"The sects continue to spread in Latin America," said Professor Guzman Carriquiry, undersecretary at the Pontifical
Council for Lay People and one of the few non-clerics in the Vatican to hold a senior position.

"We have already lost 30-40 million members to them. We have to ask ourselves questions about how we are
announcing the gospel, how we are teaching, why are people looking for something different?" he told
Reuters in an interview.

A study in the 1990s showed that as many as 8,000 Roman Catholics were leaving the Church in Latin America
every day to join sects they see as more charismatic and which give them more personal attention than the highly
structured Catholic Church.

"This erosion calls for a radical re-thinking of how the faith is being transmitted and received today in Latin
America," said Carriquiry, who is Uruguayan.

"If we lose the Catholic tradition in Latin America, our people will lose, and all of Catholicism will lose out.
The very future is at stake," he said.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the Church realized "it should also have the capacity of
self-criticism" and the Pope will likely discuss the defections in speeches.

Benedict is best known in Latin America for what he did as Cardinal Ratzinger, when, as head of the Vatican's
doctrinal body, he disciplined a string of Latin America's Liberation Theologians.

The late Pope John Paul was convinced that, in their defense of social justice, Liberation Theologians were
inspired by Marxist political analysis. He and other critics accused them of promoting a violent class
struggle. [And weren't/aren't they? Marxists and advocates of class struggle, as they remain to this day? As though
God only created the poor and everybody else does not count.]

Although many in the Vatican think Liberation Theology is yesterday's problem and say the Pope will not
likely dwell on the issue, it still divides the Church in Latin America and many there still see the
interventions of the 1980s as open wounds.

Other issues will likely to be the Church's role in helping the poor, the crippling shortage of priests, and how
it will deal with growing secularization in a globalizes world.

The Pope will also visit Sao Paolo, South America's largest city, canonize Brazil's first native-born saint,
and visit a drug rehabilitation centre.

Vatican officials expect inevitable comparisons with the late Pope John Paul, who visited Latin America 18 times
during his papacy of nearly 27 years and had an easy relationship with the more expressive outward culture
of its people.

"In Latin America there is a devotion to the Pope as head of the Church, regardless of who he is," said
Carriquiry. "There will be a great and festive welcome. We'll see how he reacts."

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 16.02]

And here are the stories based on interviews given by Cardinal Bertone about the Pope's trip, as posted 5/7/07
in NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT.

The Pope will speak out strongly
on the problems of Latin America,
Bertone says

VATICAN CITY, May 7 (PETRUS) - Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, told journalists today
that Pope Benedict XVI in his various messages will directly address the major problems of Latin America when
he visits Brazil later this week.

Cardinal Bertone spoke after inaugurating a course at the Pontifical Gregorian University attended by
some 20 diplomats from the embassies of various Muslim states to the Holy See, to inform them about the
structures of the Vatican as a state and of the Catholic Church
itself.

The course is one of the outcomes of the controversy that followed the Pope's Regensburg lecture.

Bertone told newsmen afterwards the Church has always followed "with great concern" the problems
of Latin America, particularly "poverty, unequal distribution of wealth, and violence" as well as the
"exodus of Catholics to Protestant sects".

At the same time, he said, there have been recent "signs of hope, the recovery of missionary initiative
and of lay commmitment among Catholics."

During the Holy Father's visit this week, he said, the Pope will issue 'strong messages' on these issues,
as well as on the question of right to life and the defense of life. He expressed the hope that the Pope's
messages would be welcomed not only by Catholics but also by politicians.

"The Pope will make an appeal for an equitable distribution of wealth as well as respect for the rights
of everyone, especially those who are weakest and most defenseless."

He declined to say whether the Pope would make a specific appeal to the leaders of Latin American
against the decriminalization of abortion.

"The Pope is fine-tuning his speeches. Of course, he will have discussions of a 'political' nature with
Brazil's leaders and his messages will be meant for everyone, not just Catholics. In general, the Pope
will address the bishops and priests of the local churches and the Catholic communities therein, and finally,
all men of goodwill who are sincerely interested in the good of Latin America."

On the question of the rise of Protestant sects in Brazil, Bertone said: "Probably the emergency that
the Church faces internally in Brazil is how to carry out a more solid effort at evangelization and
a stronger, more effective catechesis in order to counteract the effect of Protestant sects on the Church."

He cited "hopeful signs" such as the "return of vocations to trhe relgiious and consecrated life" among
Catholics not only in Brazil but throughout Latin America.

Bertone said that Church diplomacy at present is also focused on the problems of war and peace in the
Middle East, and of poverty and civil conflicts in Africa.


Aparecida to launch new bid
for evangelization, solidarity
and justice in Latin America

In three days, Benedict XVI will be leaving for Brazil to inaugurate the fifth general conference of
Latin American and Caribbean bishops, in what will be his first pastoral visit to Latin America.

It is the sixth foreign voyage for the Pope in two years. On this occasion, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone,
Vatican Secretary of State, gave a long interview to the principal newspaper of Sao Paulo, Folha
de Sao Paulo, and to Vatican Radio. Giovanni Peduto reported for Vatican Radio.

Carinal Bertone: Everyone knows that the visit first came about because of the fifth general Conference
of CELAM. Although it is his first trip to Latin America as Pope, he knows Latin America quite well,
from meeting with all the bishops of Latin America regularly at the Vatican dutring their ad-limina visits
in the past quarter century.

He has also taken part in meetings held in Latin America. For example, a meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico,
in 1996 with the president and bishops representing the various dctrinal commissions on the Continent.
[As Cardinal, he has also been to Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and twice to Brazil before, in 1985 and 1990].

So for him, this is a return, and to the great nation of Brazil which is the most populous Catholic country
in the world. Now, as Pope, he must face the challenges and the problems of this great Christian continent,
profoundly Christian, at the start of the third millennium - a continent John Paul II called 'the continent
of hope.'

It has its peculiarities, precisely because it was evangelized early [from the 16th century], and
Christianity has permeated its history, all its structures and activities - even if, unfortunately, that
has not helped resolve the more burning problems of the continent - inequality, poverty and even oppression.

Therefore it is a providential occasion to launch a message to all pastoral workers, to local communities,
to the local Churches, to all Christians and to men of goodwill, for a great movement of solidarity
and promotion of justice in that Continent.

How does the Holy See view the road that the Church should take in Latin America?
As we had occasion to discuss at the meeting here last February of all the Apostolic Nuncios in the 22
countries of Latin America, it is a continent that has been greatly wounded by too many tragic
situations. Let us just think of the violence that afflicts its cities, of drug trafficking which is
becoming more powerful and aggressive, of social inequalities, of unemployment, migration, deteriorating
education which affects young people most who make up the great majority of citizens, but also the
shortcomings of representative democracy.

Of course, the Church is present in all this to consolidate the 'good news' of the Gospel, but also
to promote a 'human revolution' for equality and justice and peace which is in the very DNA of the Church,
and which is brought about and carried forward by all the elements that make up the Church: the bishops,
the hierarchy, laymen, the great religious congregations, old and new, the lay movements.

And so the Church sees positive signs in the local communities there and a new growth in vocations to
the priesthood and the consecrated life, as well as increased awareness among the laity which must be
supported and made to grow.


The preparatory document for the fifth conference in Aparecida stresses in several places
the situations of injustice and inequality found in Latin America. What kind of response
may we expect from the Conference?
The Church has a matrix, a program of social action spelled out in the social doctrine of the Church,
which has been distributed throughout the world, which has been taken on and assimilated, I would say,
by laymen engaged in social and poltiical work, but also by the religious, the priests and the bishops.
This social doctrine illumines us and inspires our actions.

The fifth Conference - with the capacity of its participants to make objective observations of actual
situations - will identify the specific lines that should be followed - as they did Medellin, Puebla
and Santo Domingo [previous sites of CELAM conferences].

There is no doubt that all the ecclesial components are engaged in a double task - in true evangelization,
and therefore, consolidation of the Christian faith, of Christian knowledge and experience of life;
and in social action and human promotion.

There are thousands of initiatives, for instance, from Europe and the other continents to aid Latin
America. For instance, I will be going to Peru soon to accompany an Italian assocaition called
Operation Mato Grosso, which does social action work in Latin America.

The church in Latin America must consolidate, ratify, verify, maybe correct defects and deficiencies
in all these various efforts, in order to amplify this immense activity, a river of social charity
which runs through all of Latin America.

What are your expectations out of this conference in Aparecida?
Above all, a reinforcement of ecclesial unity in the mission entrusted to the Catholic church in
Latin America - unity of the bishops and local churches among themselves, their unity and communion
with the Pope and therefore with the supreme pastor of the universal achurch, who comes to bring
his word, his solidarity with his messages which - as we have seen in the past two years - are very
incisive and touch people intimately and goes to the heart of their real problems.

Of course, the Pope places great importance, first of all, in instilling in people's hearts a passionate
love for Christ, and expects that the bishops and priests of the Church likewise give first place to
this love of Christ as the unique and universal Savior.

So with eyes fixed on Christ, unity among themselves and with Christ the Savior. Then, to emphasize
the encounter with Jesus in the Eucharist, through Massgoing, especially on Sundays, as a source for
all the energies and resources that lead one to charity and love for our neighbor, as the Pope has
explained so well in his encyclical Deus caritas est.

I think these two lines - the attraction to Christ and unity with Him, and the operative line of
charitable, social and even political action by members of the Church in the societies they inhabit,
as yeast for society - will be the two master lines which will be assumed and launched into action
by the conference in Aparecida.


PREPARING FOR THE POPE:


Portuguese stylist Maria Laura Correia with outfits
she created for Pope Benedict's liturgies in Sao Paulo.



Stage for the Pope is all set at Pacaembu stadium,
Sao Paulo, where he will meet the youth on May 10.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/05/2007 16.11]