Brazilians in need, physical or spiritual,
seek St. Galvao's pills
By Lise Alves
Catholic News Service

SAO PAULO, Brazil, May 11 (CNS) -- The Brazilians stood quietly in a line, waiting for the nuns at the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception of Light to open the door and start handing out "Frei Galvao's pills."

Normally, the nuns distribute packets containing three pills to be taken within a nine-day period. The pills are tiny rice papers inscribed with a prayer, ingested by those in need.

The uncertainty as to whether or not the doors would open came from the fact that at that exact time May 11, less than two miles away, Pope Benedict XVI was canonizing Franciscan Father Antonio Galvao in front of nearly 800,000 people.

"The first time I swallowed the pills I was 8 years old," said Marta Monteiro, who this time brought her husband and teenage son. "I was sick and some aunts came to the monastery to get the pills for me."

Monteiro said that when she was pregnant with her son she also came to receive the pills, which are said to help women in labor. Now, she said, she occasionally will stop by the monastery to obtain the pills.

Katia Cristina de Souza, 35, said she came to the monastery because she was unable to wait the long hours to see the pope and witness the canonization. De Souza was diagnosed with breast cancer in February; in March, when she started chemotherapy, she also started to come on a weekly basis to receive Frei Galvao's pills.

De Souza, wearing a green bandanna to hide her loss of hair from the treatment, said she has begun to feel better, and that this improvement comes from the blessing granted to her by St. Galvao.

"For years I used to come here occasionally," she said. "Now, in my hour of need, I feel Frei Galvao has not let me down."

De Souza said the line for the pills is always long, no matter what day of the week she comes.

"People have always shown an enormous love for Frei Galvao, even before his sainthood," she added.

Antonio Galvao was born in Guaratingueta, in the interior of Sao Paulo state, in 1739. After becoming a Franciscan in Rio de Janeiro, he was transferred to Sao Paulo. In 1774 he founded the Monastery of the Immaculate Conception of Light.

At the monastery, St. Galvao was asked to help a woman through a difficult childbirth. The friar is said to have written a prayer on a tiny piece of paper, which was swallowed by the woman. The woman and child survived the ordeal.

The prayer written on the piece of paper was: "After the birth, the Virgin remained intact; Mother of God, intercede on our behalf."

After that, pregnant women as well as the sick came frequently to St. Galvao seeking his "miracle pills."

The friar was beatified by the late Pope John Paul II in 1998 after Vatican recognition of a first miracle through his intercession: the 1990 cure of a 4-year-old child thought to have an incurable disease. In December, the Vatican recognized a second miracle: In 1999 a mother and her child survived a high-risk pregnancy after the woman swallowed Frei Galvao's pills.

For years, Brazilians from all over the country and even some foreigners have come to the monastery seeking the pills. The nuns who manufacture the pills also send them through the mail.

Lucia de Paula said she comes at least once a month to obtain pills to send back to her hometown in Fortaleza, in northeastern Brazil. She said that eight years ago a friend from Rio de Janeiro told her about the pills. De Paula said she came to the monastery seeking the pills for her aunt, who had cancer and was given only a few months to live.

"With Frei Galvao's pills she turned 86 years old last month," she said with a smile.

There are those, however, like student Mosania Chavez, who came to the monastery May 11 for the first time. She said that although she is not sick she came to obtain the pills because she feels uneasy about her life.

"People say that these pills have the power to cure; maybe they will end my insecurities," she said with a smile. She added that although she is a practicing Catholic she had never heard of the pills before the pope's visit.

After more than an hour of waiting in line for the pills, followers were told that the doors would open in the early afternoon, after the canonization. For Monteiro, de Souza and de Paula, however, the delay was only a minor setback; they promised to return the following week.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/05/2007 23.59]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 4.08]

Here is the Vatican translation of the address delivered by the Holy Father to the community at Facenda da Esperanca in Guaratingueta on Saturday, May 12.


Dear Friends!

At last I am here with you at "Fazenda da Esperança "!

1. I greet with particular affection Brother Hans Stapel, founder of the charity "Nossa Senhora da Glória", which is also known as "Fazenda da Esperança ". Firstly I wish to rejoice with each of you for having believed in the ideals of good and of peace which define this place.

To all of you who have come here today from the various "fazendas" to be with the Pope - those undergoing treatment and those who have been cured, volunteers, families, those who have already been through the programme, and benefactors -- I wish to say: "pax et bonum!"

I know that there are representatives here from other places where the "Fazenda da Esperança " has opened centres. You have come to see the Pope. You have come to listen and to assimilate what I wish to say to you.

2. The Church of today needs a renewed awareness of its task to draw the world's attention to the voice of him who says: "I am the light of the world; he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life" (John 8:12). I

t is the Pope's mission to renew in the hearts of people everywhere that light which does not grow dim, because it seeks to illumine the depths of every soul that seeks the true good and peace that the world cannot give.

All that this light needs is a heart open to the desire for God. God does not force us, he does not oppress our individual freedom; he simply asks for openness in the inner sanctum of our conscience, through which pass all our noblest aspirations, as well as the affections and disordered passions which tend to obscure the message of the Almighty.

3. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me" (Revelation 3:20). These are divine words which penetrate to the depths of our souls and shake us at our deepest roots.

At some stage in people's lives, Jesus comes and gently knocks at the hearts of those properly disposed. Perhaps for you, he did this through a friend or a priest, or, who knows, perhaps he arranged a series of coincidences which enabled you to realize that you are loved by God.

Through the institution which has welcomed you, the Lord has given you this opportunity for physical and spiritual recovery, so vital for you and your families. In turn, society expects you to spread this precious gift of health among your friends and all the members of the community.

You must be Ambassadors of hope! Brazil's statistics concerning drug abuse and other forms of chemical dependency are very high. The same is true of Latin America in general.

I therefore urge the drug-dealers to reflect on the grave harm they are inflicting on countless young people and on adults from every level of society: God will call you to account for your deeds. Human dignity cannot be trampled upon in this way. The harm done will receive the same censure that Jesus reserved for those who gave scandal to the "little ones", the favourites of God (cf. Matthew 18:7-10).

4. Through treatment, which includes medical, psychological and educational assistance, and through much prayer, manual work and discipline, many people - especially young people - have already succeeded in freeing themselves from alcohol and drug dependency, thereby recovering meaning in their lives.

I wish to express my appreciation for this work, which has the charism of Saint Francis and the spirituality of the Focolare Movement as its spiritual foundation.

Reintegration in society undoubtedly demonstrates the effectiveness of your initiative. Yet it is the conversions, the rediscovery of God and active participation in the life of the Church which attract even greater attention and which confirm the importance of your work. It is not enough to care for the body, we must adorn the soul with the most precious divine gifts acquired through Baptism.

Let us thank God for all those who have set out along the path of renewed hope, with the help of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the celebration of the Eucharist.

5. Dear friends, I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking all those who contribute materially and spiritually to enable the charity "Nossa Senhora da Glória" to continue its work.

May God bless Brother Hans Stapel and Nelson Giovanelli Ros for having answered his call to devote their lives to you. I ask the Lord also to bless all those who work here: the consecrated men and women, and the volunteers. We ask God's special blessing too on all those friends, support groups and authorities who supply your needs, and on all those who love Christ present in these beloved children of his.

My thoughts turn now to those many other institutions throughout the world which work to rebuild and renew the lives of these brothers and sisters of ours present in our midst, whom God loves with a preferential love.

I am thinking of groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous as well as the sobriety associations working generously in many communities so as to build up the lives of others.

6. The proximity of the Shrine of Aparecida assures us that the "Fazenda da Esperança " came into being under her protection and maternal gaze.

For a long time now, in my prayers, I have been asking Our Lady, Queen and Patron of Brazil, to extend her protective mantle over the participants in the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Your presence here provides a considerable help for the success of this great gathering; offer your prayers, sacrifices, and renunciations on the altar of the Chapel, in the certainty that they will rise up to heaven in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as a fragrant offering to Almighty God. I am counting on your help!

May Saint Frei Galvão and Saint Crescentia keep watch over you and protect each one of you. I bless you all in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

[Original text: Portuguese]
© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

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


ADDRESS TO POOR CLARES

And here is the Vatican translation of the Pope's address to the Poor Clares at the Facenda:


Be praised, my Lord, for all your creatures!

With these words, addressed to the Almighty and Good Lord, the Poor Saint of Assisi acknowledged the unique bounty of God the Creator, and the tenderness, strength and beauty that gently flows out upon all his creatures, making them mirrors of the Creator's omnipotence.

Dear Sisters, spiritual daughters of Saint Clare, our gathering here in this "Fazenda da Esperança " is meant to be a sign of the affection of the Successor of Peter towards the cloistered Sisters, and also a serene manifestation of love, echoing through the hills and valleys of the Mantiqueira mountain-range and spreading throughout the whole land: "No speech, no word, no voice is heard; yet their span extends through all the earth, their words to the utmost bounds of the world" (Psalm 18:4-5).

From this place, the daughters of Saint Clare proclaim: "Be praised, my Lord, for all your creatures!"

In places where society no longer sees any future or hope, Christians are called to proclaim the power of the Resurrection: it is here, in this "Fazenda da Esperança " - home to so many, especially young people, who are seeking to overcome drug addiction, alcoholism, and chemical dependency - that a clear witness is given to the Gospel of Christ amid a consumer society far removed from God.

What a contrast from the prospect of the Creator beholding his work! In their contemplative lives, the Poor Clare Sisters and other cloistered religious gaze upon the greatness of God and also discover the beauty of his creation; hence they can picture him as the sacred author indicates, caught up in wonder at his handiwork, his beloved creation: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good!" (Genesis 1:31).

When sin entered the world, and with sin, death, God's beloved creation, though wounded, was not totally deprived of beauty: on the contrary, a still greater love was received: "O happy fault, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!" - as the Church proclaims in the Exsultet during the mysterious and radiant night of Easter.

It is the risen Christ who heals the wounds and saves the sons and daughters of God, saves humanity from death, from sin and from slavery to passions. The Passover of Christ unites heaven and earth.

In this Fazenda da Esperança, the prayers of the Poor Clare Sisters are united with the demanding work of medicine and therapy in order to vanquish the prisons and break the chains of drugs that bring so much suffering to God's beloved children.

In this way God's creation is restored to the beauty that so delights and amazes its Creator. He is the Almighty Father, it is he alone whose essence is love and whose glory is man fully alive, in the expression of Saint Irenaeus.

He "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" (John 3:16), in order to raise up the one who had fallen along the roadside, attacked and wounded by thieves on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho.

On the pathways of the world, Jesus is "the hand" that the Father stretches out to sinners; he is the way that leads to peace (cf. Second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation). Truly we discover here that the beauty of creation and the love of God are inseparable.

Francis and Clare of Assisi also discover this secret and they propose to their beloved sons and daughters one very simple thing: to live the Gospel. This is their norm of conduct and their rule of life. Clare expressed it very well when she said to her sisters: "Among yourselves, my daughters, let there be the same love with which Christ has loved you" (Testament).

In this same love, Brother Hans invited them to be the guarantors of all the work carried out in the Fazenda da Esperança. Through the strength of silent prayer, through fasting and penance, the daughters of Saint Clare live out the commandment of love for God and neighbour in its supreme form, loving to the end.

This means that we must never lose hope! Hence the name given to this work by Brother Hans: Fazenda da Esperança. We need to build up hope, weaving the fabric of a society that, by relaxing its grip on the threads of life, is losing the true sense of hope. This loss, according to Saint Paul, is the self-imposed curse of "heartless persons" (cf. Romans 1:31).

My dear Sisters, make it your task to proclaim that "hope does not disappoint" (Romans 5:5). May the sorrow of the Crucified Lord, which filled Mary's soul at the foot of the Cross, console the hearts of many mothers and fathers who weep with sorrow because of their children's continuing dependency on drugs.

By your silent prayerful self-offering, an eloquent silence that the Father hears, proclaim the message of love that conquers sorrow, drugs and death. Proclaim Jesus Christ, a human being like us, who suffers like ourselves, who took our sins upon himself in order to deliver us from them!

Soon we shall begin the Fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean at the Shrine of Aparecida, so close to the Fazenda da Esperança. I trust in your prayers, that our peoples may have life in Jesus Christ and that we may all be his disciples and missionaries.

I implore Mary, the Mother Aparecida, the Virgin of Nazareth who, in following Christ, kept all these things in her heart, to keep you in the fruitful silence of prayer.

To all cloistered Sisters, especially to the Poor Clares present in this institution, I impart my blessing with great affection.

[Original text: Portuguese]
© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

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

DAY 4 MISCELLANEA


Before the Pope's arrival in Aparecida yesterday, soldiers fan out to provide security. The altar for the Pope's Mass
on Sunday is ready in front of the Basilica.



Pilgrims outside Bom Jesus seminary where the Pope is staying.


More signs of Pope fever:





Farm family living between Guaratingueta and Aparecida
watch TV so they know when to come out to watch
the Pope pass through





Pilgrims have been camped at the Mass site in front of the basilica of Our Lady Aparecida since Friday.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2007 5.00]

Day Four:
Facing dramatic losses, Benedict says:
‘It’s worth it to stay Catholic!’
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Aparecida, Brazil
Posted on May 12, 2007


Delivering his most direct appeal yet to Latin Americans not to desert the Catholic church, Benedict visited the largest Marian sanctuary in the southern hemisphere tonight and thundered, “The church is our home! This is our home!”

Almost imploring his audience, Benedict said, “In the church, we find everything that’s good, everything that brings us security and relief! Whoever accepts Christ as ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’ in his totality, is assured of peace and happiness, in this life and the next! For this reason, the pope has come here to pray and to confess with all of you: It’s worth it to remain faithful, it’s worth it to persevere in the faith!”

Those exclamation points, by the way, are all in the original.

Though Benedict did not make the point, the context to his appeal is the dramatic defection away from the Catholic church across Latin America in recent decades, generally to one of two options: the burgeoning Pentecostal and Evangelical movements that dot the continent, or to a lack of religious faith altogether.

The break-up of Catholicism’s 500-year religious monopoly in Latin American has been remarkably swift.

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.

Meanwhile, some religious sociologists say that the growth in the number of Latin Americans without any religious affiliation is, if anything, even more dramatic. Fr. Jose Oscar Beozzo, for example, told NCR that from 1980 to 2000, the percentage of Brazilians who say they have no religious affiliation went from 0.7 percent to 7.3 percent, a ten-fold increase.

Most of that increase, Beozzo said, has been among the poor of Brazil’s new urban peripheries, meaning that for the first time, a lack of religious faith has become a “mass phenomenon” in the country.

Aware of those trends, Benedict addressed Latin Americans directly, telling them he is aware they have a “great thirst for God,” and assuring them that their desires can be satisfied within the Catholic church. The pope called for a “new Pentecost” in the region.

At the same time, Benedict said that simply wearing the Catholic label is not enough.

“Coherence in the faith requires a solid doctrinal and spiritual formation, contributing to building a more just, more human and more Christian society,” he said. “The Catechism of the Catholic Church, also in its abbreviated version published under the title of the Compendium will be of help in developing a clear understanding of our faith.”

Benedict’s remarks came after praying the rosary with bishops, priests and religious of Brazil, along with delegates to the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean. The service took place in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Aparecida, the largest Marian shrine in Latin America, and for that matter, anywhere outside of Europe.

The word “Aparecida” means “she who appeared,” and it refers to the tradition that a statue of Mary without its head was discovered in a river by some local fishermen in 1717. Later, the fishermen found the head, and began to bring in huge numbers of fish. Devotion to the statue spread along with stories of miracles attributed to its intercession. In 1929, Our Lady of Aparecida was declared the Patroness of Brazil.

Among other things, Benedict advised his audience to “remain in the school of Mary.”

Thanking the Brazilians for their warm welcome, Benedict said that his predecessor, John Paul II, “mentioned many times your kindness and your fraternal welcome. He was absolutely right!”

Benedict went on to thank priests, deacons and seminarians for their service to the church. As he has on other occasions during the Brazil trip, Benedict made a special point of singling out members of religious communities for praise.

“You, men and women religious, are an offering, a gift, a divine blessing that the church has received from its Lord,” the pope said. “I thank God for your live and for the testimony that you give to the world of a faithful love of God and to others. This love without reserve – total, definitive, without conditions, and passionate – manifests itself in silence, in contemplation, in prayer, and in the most varied activities that you perform, in your religious families, in favor of all humanity, especially the poor and abandoned.”

The gesture carries special significance, given that under John Paul II many members of religious communities felt neglected by the Vatican in favor of new lay movements such as the Focolare, the Neocatechumenate, Sant’Egidio, and Communion and Liberation.

While Benedict XVI has endorsed the growth of lay movements and associations while in Brazil, they have not received the sustain attention the pope has devoted to religious orders in his prepared texts.



Pope calls on Latin Americans
to stand by the Church

Aparecida do Norte, Brazil, May 13 (dpa) - Pope Benedict XVI called Saturday on Latin Americans to maintain their 'sense of belonging to the church,' on the eve of the opening in Brazil of a major conference of the region's bishops.

'In the Catholic Church we find all that is good, all that gives grounds for security and consolation,' the pope said in Spanish, in a speech delivered mostly in Portuguese.

The pontiff spoke before religious people, deacons and seminarians gathered to greet him in the cathedral of Aparecida, the largest pilgrimage site in Latin America, 160 kilometres east of Sao Paulo.

Benedict's five-day pastoral visit to Brazil, the most populous Roman Catholic country in the world, is set to end Sunday, after he opens the Fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The gathering is expected to address the growing exodus of Catholics, mainly to Pentecostal Protestant churches that are expanding rapidly across the region.

'Anyone who accepts Christ, 'the way, the truth and the life,' in his totality, is assured of peace and happiness, in this life and in the next,' Benedict said. 'It is worth being faithful. It is worth persevering in our faith.'

The speech was heard in the pews and outside the cathedral by some 35,000 people, many of whom had waited more than 24 hours to get a chance to pray the rosary with Benedict.

After praying the rosary with the enthusiastic audience, he exhorted in Portuguese for greater efforts to evangelize.

Benedict invited Catholics 'to become profoundly missionary and to bring the good news of the gospel to every point of the compass in Latin America and in the world.'

In an atmosphere reminiscent of football games, he was acclaimed by religious people who shouted his name in Portuguese - 'Bento, Bento!' - to a tune similar to that used by the fans of the popular club Flamengo to cheer on their team.

The pope's reference to evangelization was evidence of the Catholic Church's preoccupation with the exodus of faithful in Brazil and across Latin America, which holds nearly half of the world's estimated 1.1 billion Roman Catholics.

The proportion of Pentecostals in Brazil has risen from 6.6 per cent in 1980, when the late pope John Paul II first travelled to the country, to close to 17.3 per cent in 2003, according to a recent estimate.

In turn, the proportion of Catholics in Brazil is thought to have fallen from more 90 per cent to 73 per cent, with some estimates falling as low as 64 per cent.

On Saturday, Benedict visited a drug rehabilitation centre and pledged 100,000 dollars of his own money toward the centre's work.

'Society expects you to spread this precious gift of health among your friends and all the members of the community,' the pope told recovering addicts at the Fazenda da Esperanca (Estate of Hope), near the town of Guaratingueta.

The founder of Fazenda da Esperanca, Hans Stapel, said that the money donated by the pope will be used toward a debt of 1 million dollars that the institution accrued over in recent months.

'It was an extraordinary gift. With all the debt I have, it is really a cause for hope. I hope many follow the pope's good example, because we need more generous people like him,' said the German Franciscan friar, according to the online edition of the daily Folha de Sao Paulo.

Benedict was greeted in a festive atmosphere by Stapel and by thousands of enthusiastic supporters, including some 1,500 of the centre's patients.

Stapel - who as a young man studied philosophy with fellow German Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope - founded the centre in 1983 based on spirituality, work, communal life and no medication. Since Fazenda da Esperanca - a centre with a reported 80 per cent success rate - was founded, 42 other centres based on the same model have been established around the world.

Benedict ignored security measures to approach the recovering addicts, in an unexpected move that alarmed security agents and even Stapel.

'Police tried to stop him, and I did not agree either. But the pope is an authority. He can do whatever he wants,' Stapel told reporters.

Later, Benedict again ignored security protocols by rolling down the windows of his bullet-proof 'popemobile,' seeking closer contact with the faithful as he travelled through Aparecida.
Early Sunday, Benedict is to celebrate an open-air mass in front of the basilica, where 500,000 people are expected.


© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur








GLOBO'S COVERAGE
If you did not get to see the live coverage, don't forget that video clips of everything are conveniently available at:
video.globo.com/Videos/Busca/0,,7959,00.html?b=bento%20xvi...

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 18.15]

Benedict's priorities:
Feeding humanity's spiritual and material hunger
All Things Catholic
by John L. Allen, Jr.
May 11, 2007


After the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), no local Catholic church on earth seized the social thrust of the council's message with more enthusiasm than Brazil.

The largest Catholic country on earth, Brazil also became the most important laboratory for liberation theology, which proclaimed a "preferential option for the poor" and thrust the church into struggles for progressive social change.

At the time, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was the architect of the Vatican's efforts to rein in liberation theology's more avant-garde elements. Now, some two decades after those battles, Pope Benedict XVI has come to Brazil, and to a great extent his May 9-13 trip can be read as the fruit of his mature reflection on the issues first raised during the crisis over liberation theology in the 1980s.

In effect, Benedict's message amounts to a Brazilian and Latin American application of the argument of his recent book, Jesus of Nazareth: No program of social reform will succeed if it is not anchored in the deep truths about God and the meaning of human life revealed in Jesus Christ, and transmitted through the doctrines and traditions of the Catholic church.

In São Paulo Friday morning, Benedict insisted that the saints of our epoch are the "true reformers," quoting his own homily during his first foreign trip in Cologne, Germany: "Only from the saints, only from God does true revolution come."

When Benedict was asked to approve the motto of the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which he will formally open tomorrow in Aparecida, it was "Disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, so that our people may have life." The pope asked that the final phrase be amended to, "so that our people may have life in Him. That Christological flourish hinted at the leitmotif of the trip.

So far, Brazil has offered an intriguing mix of what many regard as "the real Ratzinger," with tough talk on abortion, marriage, priestly celibacy and ecclesiastical discipline, along with the more pastoral Benedict - praising the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador; urging work on behalf of the poor, the Amazon rainforest, and in general for "a more just and fraternal society"; and, by virtue of his very choice to be here, offering an olive branch to a Brazilian church long seen as estranged from Rome.

At bottom, Benedict's pitch seems to be that the famous social commitment of Brazilian Catholicism - which he certainly has endorsed - must nevertheless yield pride of place to a clear focus on Catholic fundamentals, above all what the pope calls "the primacy of God."

There are no short-cuts, the pope has implied; one cannot defend the poor without defending the family and the unborn, and one cannot serve humanity without feeding its spiritual as well as material hunger. The failure to keep those priorities clear, he suggested in an address to Brazilian bishops on Friday, goes a long way towards explaining the losses of the Catholic church to Pentecostal and Evangelical "sects."

That message has played well with the enthusiastic crowds that have greeted him, but those crowds have been relatively small in the context of the largest Catholic country in the world. The estimated 600,000 to 800,000 people who came to his major outdoor Mass in São Paulo on Friday, for example, represent just 2 to 2.5 percent of the roughly 30 million inhabitants of the greater metropolitan area, the overwhelming majority of whom are at least nominally Catholic.

Of course, the content of a papal trip can never be reduced to a single sound-bite. The Brazil trip carries different significance depending upon one's point of view, which perhaps can be best expressed in terms of concentric circles: the local church in Brazil, the church in Latin America, social and political life in Latin America, and finally the universal church and the world.

The Local Church

For many Brazilian Catholics, the pope's presence marks an end to their "years in the wilderness," a 30-year period of on-again, off-again tension between Brazil and Rome. During that time, many in the Vatican saw Brazil as a church in which the "social gospel" of liberation theology had eclipsed more primary spiritual and doctrinal principles, while many Brazilian Catholics regarded Rome as "out of touch" and insensitive to the country's urgent social challenges.

Signs of Brazil's "troubled child" status in Catholic affairs are not hard to find.

For example, when CELAM, the umbrella group for the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, was founded, the idea was that its presidency would rotate between a Brazilian and someone from another Latin American country, representing the two great linguistic and cultural streams of Latin America, Portuguese and Spanish. Since 1979, however, no Brazilian has served as president of CELAM.

Among the Brazilian bishops, the running joke is that the highest office in CELAM to which a Brazilian can aspire is a second vice-presidency. (In fact, the newly elected president of the Brazilian bishops' conference, Archbishop Geraldo Lyrio Rocha of Mariana, is a second vice-president in CELAM).

At the level of the universal church, the fact that Brazil has only two cardinals under the age of 80 and thus eligible to elect the next pope, despite being the largest Catholic country in the world, is a clear signal that something isn't quite right. The United States, by way of contrast, currently has 12 cardinal-electors.

In that light, many Brazilian Catholics were impressed that Benedict XVI made a personal choice to come here.

The Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM) had initially planned to hold their fifth General Conference in Quito, Ecuador. After a change in leadership within CELAM, the leading candidates were Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eventually the choice fell on Buenos Aires, which would have given us the storyline of the new pope being hosted by the man who was, in effect, his runner-up in the conclave of 2005, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergolio of Argentina. Benedict, however, asked that the event be staged in Brazil.

The pope had already accepted an invitation to visit the Marian shrine at Aparecida, and logistically holding the CELAM meeting there avoided the possibility of two overseas voyages. [No. The story, reported from the very first, and recently confirmed by Cardinal Hummes, is that the bishops had asked him where the confrence should be held - as originally it was supposed to have been in Quito, Ecuador, but it was re-programmed for Rome in order to accommodate John Paul II who at the time was already unable to travel. When, after the last Bishops Synod in October 2005, four Latin-American bishops came to Benedict and asked him where the conference should be held, he said, "We'll do it in Aparecida, adn I'll be there," or words to that effect.]

More profoundly, however, many Brazilian Catholics took Benedict's choice as a signal of personal interest. Brazilian sources say the pope was deeply struck by an address given by Cardinal Claudio Hummes at the Synod on the Eucharist in 2005, when Hummes, then the Archbishop of São Paulo, surveyed the growth of Pentecostalism and secularism and pointedly asked, "How much longer will Brazil remain a Catholic country?"

Since then, Benedict XVI has called Hummes to Rome as the Prefect of the Congregation for Clergy, creating a badly needed line of communication between Brazil and the Vatican. By deciding to come to Brazil in person, the pope is also trying to give the church here a shot in the arm.

"This visit normalizes Brazil's situation within the universal church," said Fr. Jose Oscar Beozzo, a priest of the Lins diocese near São Paulo, and a leading expert on the country's religion situation. Beozzo predicted that the warmth and joy with which Benedict has been received will reinforce this rapprochement, and leave the pope with a positive impression of Brazil.

To forgive, however, is not necessarily to forget. In a tough speech to the some 430 bishops of Brazil in a meeting in the Cathedral da Sé in São Paulo on Friday, Benedict issued a unmistakable call to discipline.

Saying he wanted to address "the most important themes that impose themselves on my consideration as pastor of the universal church," Benedict stressed:

o Placing the faith and sacramental life of the church first, before involvement in social and political problems;
o Defending life against "offenses justified in the name of individual liberty";
o Opposing divorce and "free unions";
o Defending priestly celibacy, and in general steering priests away from "ideological and political, even partisan" attitudes;
o Offering deep evangelization and catechesis to Catholics, to protect them from the "aggressive proselytism of the sects";
o Ensuring that individual confession, rather than communal rites, remains the normal form of the sacrament;
o Restoring a sense of the sacred to liturgies, and ensuring that liturgical rules are observed;
o Ensuring that the faith is transmitted "without reductive visions and confusion about the mission" of the church;
o Avoiding "the risk of deviations in the area of sexuality";
o Promoting a "frank" form of ecumenism, capable not only of dialogue, but also of defending the faith.

"The integrity of the faith, together with ecclesiastical discipline, is and always will be a theme that requires the attention and commitment of all of you, above all when it's a matter of drawing the consequences of the fact that 'there is only one faith and one baptism,'" Benedict XVI told the bishops.

The Church in Latin America

The primary purpose of Benedict's visit is to open the Fifth General Conference of CELAM in Aparecida, which will run until May 31.

That meeting is intended to craft strategy to carry Latin American Catholicism through the next decade or so, in the face of enormous challenges:
o The growth of Pentecostal churches and movements eating into Catholic populations;
o A widespread priest shortage that leaves the church's pastoral net with gaping holes; and
o A progressive secularization and abandonment of religious faith, which has consequences for the continent's political and cultural future.

To offer just one example of the enormity of these challenges, Beozzo pointed out that Brazil has just over 18,000 priests to serve a Catholic population of some 140 million or more. Meanwhile, he said, the Assemblies of God in Brazil, with an estimated 8.5 million faithful, has more than 52,000 pastors. The clergy-to-person ratio for the Catholic church in Brazil is 1 to 8,604; for the Assemblies of God, it's 1 to 35. No surprise which group is in a better position to deliver routine pastoral care.

In that light, the CELAM conference is expected to embrace a more aggressive model of lay involvement in the church's ministries. Already, Beozzo pointed out, 80 percent of the Sunday celebrations in Brazil are led by laity, simply because there aren't enough priests to say Mass.

Benedict's repeated appeals to various groups of laity in Brazil to become active in the church's efforts at evangelization and pastoral outreach may reinforce the movement in this direction.

In his address to the Brazilian bishops on Friday, Benedict called the defection a "motive of just concern," and said that in his view, the primary cause was the lack of an approach to evangelization "in which Christ and his church stand at the center of every exposition." That has left too many Catholics, he said, "with a fragile faith, sometimes confused, vacillating and naïve, even if they still have an innate religiosity."

Benedict called for an aggressive program of evangelization and missionary outreach, carried out by priests, religious and laity, and aimed especially at the urban peripheries, where Catholic losses are often the greatest. He endorsed the growth of lay movements, while stressing that they need to remain in alignment "with their pastors and in conformity with the orientations of the diocese."

More generally, the pope's presence in Latin America is a sign of the importance he attaches to the region.

"This is the largest Catholic continent, and therefore in a sense it's the largest responsibility of the pope," Benedict said. "Naturally, I desire in a special way that the largest Catholic continent should also be an exemplary continent, where the great human problems can be resolved and where we work together with the bishops, with priests, religious and laity, so that this great Catholic continent will also be a continent of life and, really, of hope. For me, this is a primordial responsibility."

One point of special importance for Latin America is that Benedict appears to want to close the page on old battles over liberation theology.

On Thursday, he held a brief meeting with the emeritus Archbishop of São Paulo, Cardinal Paulo Arns, a church liberal who often crossed swords with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the 1980s. The meeting was widely taken as a gesture of reconciliation.

Benedict also spoke in positive terms about the eventual beatification of the most important hero of the liberation theology movement, the late Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. Aboard the papal plane, Benedict said he had "no doubt" about Romero's worthiness for the honor.

On Friday, the pope even invoked a version of the "preferential option for the poor," the famous slogan of liberation theology. "The poor are the privileged audience for the gospel," he said.

At the same time, Benedict left no doubt about what he sees as the proper Christian approach to social problems.

"Where faith in Jesus Christ is absent, faith in his presence in the sacramental celebrations, the essential element for the solution of urgent social and political problems is also missing," he said. In a classic formula, Benedict phrased this in terms of defending the "primacy of God."

Society and Politics in Latin America

On the one hand, the Brazil trip has offered flashes of a pope determined to do battle with what he has called a "dictatorship of relativism." His comments aboard the papal plane about excommunication for pro-choice politicians, and his strong defense of life and marriage, are part of this pattern.

Yet taking into consideration the entirety of what the pope has had to say, his focus has not been exclusively on the hot-button "culture wars."

Instead, the pope has pressed the case for what he calls "a more just and fraternal society, reconciled and peaceful," across a wide range of issues:
o Defense of human life from conception to natural end
o Defense of the family
o Economic justice
o Struggles against corruption and violence
o Care for the elderly, and
o Environmental concern, especially with regard to what he called the "devastation of the Amazon."

In a private meeting in a government palace in São Paulo on Thursday, President 'Luiz ' Inacio Lula da Silva and Pope Benedict steered clear of potential flash-points such as abortion and contraception, focusing instead on efforts to support families, education, and environmental concerns.

Benedict's visit on Saturday to a center for victims of drug and alcohol addiction, young mothers, needy families, the homeless and HIV/AIDS victims, called the "Farm of Hope" and inspired by the spirituality of the Focolare movement, is another way of demonstrating the church's "preferential option" for the vulnerable in Latin American societies.

In that sense, Benedict seems determined to challenge Latin America to embrace the whole of the church's social teaching, though without turning the Catholic church into a political party.

"The church does not practice politics, and we respect the secular nature of the state," Benedict said aboard the papal plane. "But we offer the conditions in which a healthy politics, and consequently solutions to social problems, can mature."

The Universal Church and the World

No doubt, the element of greatest immediate interest for broad Catholic discussion from the Brazil trip came at the very beginning, during the pope's airborne news conference.

In light of reports that Mexican bishops had raised the question of excommunication politicians who voted in favor of legalizing abortion in Mexico City, Benedict was asked if he shared that position.

Here is the pope's word-for-word response, translated from the Italian:

"Yes, this excommunication was not something arbitrary, but it's part of the Code. It's based simply on the principle that the killing of an innocent human child is incompatible with going in communion with the Body of Christ. Thus, they didn't do anything new, anything surprising or arbitrary. In that light, they simply announced publicly what is contained in the law of the church, and the law of the church is based upon the doctrine and the faith of the church, which expresses our appreciation for life, that human individuality, human personality, is present from the first moment."

It's interesting to note that when the Vatican posted an official transcript of the press conference on its Web site on Thursday, these comments had been retouched slightly. The initial "yes" was removed, the phrase "this excommunication" became "the excommunication," and "they didn't do anything new" (with "they" referring to the Mexican bishops) became "this didn't invent anything new." The overall effect is to lift the comment a bit out of the specific Mexican context, making it more universal.

[All right- VERY IMPORTANT! this clears up the translation bit.The "yes" was there, and the Pope apparently did say "questa scomunica", not 'la scomunica". But it was ill-advised to 'edit' the Pope's words the way the Vatican did, especially something as controversial and which is on the record (taped). What he said was understandable in context, even without the 'editing' - but especially with the clarification made by Fr. Lombardi on the flight shortly after the enws conference.]

No sooner had the press conference broken up than the Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, returned to the press compartment to say that the pope had not intended to break new ground. Moreover, Lombardi noted, the Mexican bishops haven't actually excommunicated anyone, and neither has the pope.

The overall effect was to leave some confusion as to the precise thrust of the pope's remarks - shades of 2004, when both sides in the debate within American Catholicism over the issue of communion for pro-choice Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry cited different messages from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to support their positions.

What is to one to make of the mixed signals? Three conclusions seem warranted.

First, Benedict XVI clearly feels that a Catholic politician who knowingly and consistently supports abortion rights should not receive communion. Second, he's willing to put the weight of his office behind bishops who assert that principle in specific cases; that was the force of his answer to the question about Mexico.

Third, however, it's not yet clear if Benedict intends to impose that position on bishops who draw different conclusions in other pastoral contexts. His support in 2004 for the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which by a vote of 183-6 opted to leave the judgment up to individual bishops, suggests that Benedict may not yet be prepared to take that step.

At a minimum, Benedict's comments seem likely to embolden those forces in the church eager to take a harder line.

Setting aside the debate over abortion and excommunication, the basic message for the wider world that resonates from Benedict's presence in Brazil, and at the CELAM conference, is perhaps the most simple of all: Latin America matters.

"We know the problems of Latin America, and we want to mobilize the capacity of the church, its moral strength and its religious resources, to respond to the specific mission of the church, to our universal responsibility to the human person as such, and to society as such," Benedict said on Wednesday.

Benedict and Brazil's Catholic Leftists
By JEFF ISRAELY
SAO PAULO
Friday, May. 11, 2007

When he ran the Vatican's doctrinal office, one of the nicknames slapped on Joseph Ratzinger was "Cardinal No." As Pope John Paul II's enforcer of orthodoxy, he condemned errant personal behavior among the Catholic faithful, and reined in dissident Church theologians.

Now, as pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI spends most of his time trying to convince his followers to say yes to the Christian gospel. Indeed his one Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), surprised some of his longtime critics by the positive note on which he was beginning his now two-year-old papacy.

There have, though, been intermittent reminders that the old Ratzinger thinking lives on inside the person of the Pope, including his message at the beginning of his current five-day trip to Brazil: Catholic politicians who support abortion rights risk excommunication.

Brazil Welcomes a Very Different Pope
Where John Paul II connected with Latin American Catholics' passion, Benedict XVI is a cerebral, deeply European pontiff

Behind Brazil's Catholic Resurgence
As he arrives in Latin America, the Pope will be happy to see that local clergy have fended off the Protestant challenge by adopting the charismatic style of their rivals

His arrival in Sao Paulo is also a reminder of another of the German Cardinal's more notable crackdowns — his critique of "liberation theology," the Latin American movement that Ratzinger and John Paul II condemned in the 1980s for mixing Church teachings with Marxism.

Speaking to reporters on his plane, Benedict reiterated his warning against "mistaken mixing of Church and politics, of faith and politics," insisting the Church's mission was the "education of personal and social virtues," not direct intervention in the political sphere.

And while he spoke positively of the push for sainthood for progressive Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was killed in 1980 while celebrating Mass, Benedict complained] [Why must a simple statement be characterized with an obviously judgmental word?] that Romero's cause had been hijacked by supporters of liberation theology. [He didn't use the word hijacked, obviously - he said Romero was being 'used" etc.]

Of course, the battle lines in the region have changed considerably since John Paul wagged his finger at Nicaraguan priest and Sandinista government minister Ernesto Cardenal on a trip to Managua in 1983, warning him to "straighten out the situation in your church."

Catholics in Latin America continue to fight for social justice, and disagreements persist about just how and if welfare policy and religious piety should cohabitate. But after the specter of Marxism faded and John Paul proved to be ][Was there ever any question of that?] a great champion of the poor, new alliances have formed.

Liberation theologians still say and write things that are at odds with the Vatican hierarchy, but liberation theology as such is no longer at the center of the debate, although the issues it raised remain so — today, the Church is conducting a more broadly defined debate about how to fight for social justice. For example, a group of progressive bishops last week sent a letter to the Brazilian National Bishops Conference urging a more enlightened stance on social issues.

In fact, with communism gone as an historical antagonist to the Church, there may be more room for social activists and the Roman hierarchy to seek solutions together.

It seemed only natural this week for the Pope and Brazil's leftist president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a longtime ally of the liberation theology movement, to agree on making a central priority of shrinking of the gap between rich and poor, and challenging the "mercantilization" of human beings in an age of globalization.

Benedict, on Friday, led the canonization ceremony in Sao Paulo for the first-ever Brazilian-born saint, an 18th century Franciscan priest named Frei Antonio San'Anna Galvao, admired for his work with the disadvantaged. He praised Frei Galvao's "willingness to be of service to the people whenever he was asked... a bringer of peace to souls and families, and a dispenser of charity especially towards the poor and sick."

Benedict is also set to visit a drug rehabilitation center on Saturday in the town of Aparecida.

Helping those in need is at the very heart of the Christian faith, and Benedict appears inclined to [It's not a matter of inclination or personal choice at all - as though the Pope, any Pope, had a choice in this matter: It is inherent in the Christian message!] strongly reiterate that principle.

In his 2005 encyclical, he wrote passionately about the need to faith and charity one and the same. "For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others, but is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being," he writes.

"It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work."

Duncan MacLaren, the executive director of Caritas, the worldwide Catholic charity, says Benedict's message is a subtle departure from the Church's tradition of social teaching, which has been about changing unjust social structures.

MacLaren told TIME: "The Pope is saying that there is something inside us, that there should be a Christian transformation within the process of people serving others."

But it remains to be seen whether Benedict's emphasis on a personal spiritual response to poverty and inequality will satisfy those in his church who emphasize the fight for social justice outside of its walls.

—With reporting by Andrew Downie/Rio de Janeiro

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 19.35]

The magazine does not have a current story about Benedict in Brazil although an article about the book JESUS OF NAZARETH written for the May 21 issue refers to it - please see NEWS ABOUT BENEDICT.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 16.08]

PLACEHOLDER FOR NEWS COVERAGE IN TODAY'S PAPERS

My Venerable Brothers in the College of Cardinals, in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood,
Beloved Religious and all of you who have lovingly followed Christ in response to sound of his voice,
Dear Seminarians, preparing for the priestly ministry,
Dear Members of Ecclesial Movements and all you lay people who bring the power of the Gospel into the world of work and culture, in the heart of your families and your parishes!

1. Just as the Apostles, together with Mary, "went up to the upper room" and there, "with one accord devoted themselves to prayer" (Acts 1:13-14), so too we are gathered here today at the Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, which at this time is our "upper room" where Mary, Mother of the Lord, is in our midst.

Today it is she who leads our meditation; it is she who teaches us to pray. It is she who shows us the way to open our minds and hearts to the power of the Holy Spirit, who comes to fill the whole world.

We have just prayed the rosary. Through these sequences of meditations, the divine Comforter seeks to initiate us in the knowledge of Christ that issues forth from the clear source of the Gospel text.

For her part, the Church of the third millennium proposes to offer Christians the capacity for "knowledge - according to the words of Saint Paul - of God's mystery, of Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:2-3).

Mary Most Holy, the pure and immaculate Virgin, is for us a school of faith destined to guide us and give us strength on the path that leads us to the Creator of Heaven and Earth. The Pope has come to Aparecida with great joy so as to say to you first of all: "Remain in the school of Mary."

Take inspiration from her teachings, seek to welcome and to preserve in your hearts the enlightenment that she, by divine mandate, sends you from on high.

How beautiful it is to be gathered here in the name of Christ, in faith, in fraternity, in joy, in peace and in prayer, together with "Mary, the mother of Jesus" (Acts 1:14).

How beautiful it is, my dear Priests, Deacons, Consecrated men and women, Seminarians and Christian families, to be here in the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, which is God's Dwelling-place, the House of Mary and the House of the Brothers; and in the coming days it is also to serve as the setting for the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean.

How beautiful it is to be here in this Marian Basilica, towards which, at this time, the gaze and the hopes of the Christian world are turned, especially for the Christians of Latin America and the Caribbean!

2. I am glad to be here with you, in your midst! The Pope loves you! The Pope greets you affectionately! He is praying for you! And he implores the Lord's choicest blessings upon the Movements, Associations and new ecclesial realities, a living expression of the perennial youth of the Church! Be truly blessed!

From here I address my truly affectionate greeting to the families who are gathered here to represent all the dearly beloved Christian families present throughout the world. I rejoice especially with you and I offer you an embrace of peace.

I am grateful for the welcome and the hospitality of the Brazilian people. Ever since my arrival I have been received with great affection! The various manifestations of appreciation and the greetings show how much you love, esteem and respect the Successor of the Apostle Peter.

My Predecessor, the Servant of God John Paul II, mentioned on numerous occasions your affability and your spirit of fraternal welcome. He was completely right!

3. I greet the dear priests who are present, and I keep in my thoughts and prayers all the priests spread throughout the world, especially those in Latin America and the Caribbean, including the Fidei donum priests.

What great challenges, what difficult situations you have to face, with such generosity, self-denial, sacrifices and renunciations! Your faithfulness in the exercise of the ministry and the life of prayer, your search for holiness, your total self-giving to God at the service of your brothers and sisters, as you expend your lives and energy in order to promote justice, fraternity, solidarity and sharing - all this speaks powerfully to my pastoral heart.

The witness of a priestly life well lived brings nobility to the Church, calls forth admiration among the faithful, and is a source of blessings for the community; it is the best way to promote vocations, the most authentic invitation to other young people to respond positively to the Lord's call. It is true collaboration in building the Kingdom of God!

I thank you sincerely and I encourage you to continue living in a manner worthy of the vocation you have received. May the missionary fervour, the passion for an increasingly contemporary approach to evangelization, the authentic apostolic spirit and the zeal for souls always be present in your lives!

My affection, my prayers and my thanks go also to the elderly and infirm priests. Your conformation to Christ Suffering and Risen is the most fruitful apostolate. Many thanks!

4. Dear Deacons and Seminarians, you have a special place in the Pope's heart, and so I extend to you too my most fraternal and heartfelt greetings. Your exuberance, enthusiasm, idealism and encouragement to face new challenges boldly serve to give the People of God a renewed openness, make the faithful more dynamic and help the community to grow, to progress, and to become more trusting, joyful and optimistic.

I thank you for the witness that you bear, working together with your Bishops in the pastoral activities of your dioceses. Always keep before your eyes the figure of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who "came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Matthew 20:28).

Be like the first deacons of the Church: men of good reputation, filled with the Holy Spirit, with wisdom and with faith (cf. Acts 6:3-5).

And you, seminarians, give thanks to God for the call that he addresses to you. Remember that the Seminary is the cradle of your vocation and the first place where you experience communal life (cf. Directory for the Ministry and Life of Priests, 32). I ask you, with God's help, to be holy faithful and happy priests in the service of the Church!

5. I now turn my gaze and my attention to you, dear consecrated men and women, gathered here in the Shrine of the Mother, Queen and Patron of the Brazilian people, and also to those who are spread throughout the whole world.

Dear religious men and women, you are an offering, a present, a divine gift that the Church has received from her Lord. I give thanks to God for your lives and for the witness that you offer the world of faithful love for God and for your brethren.

This unreserved, totally, definitive, unconditional and impassioned love is manifested in silence, in contemplation, in prayer and in the most varied activities that you undertake in your religious families, in favour of humanity and especially of the poorest and most abandoned.

All this calls forth in the hearts of the young the desire to follow Christ the Lord more closely and radically, and to offer their lives so as to bear witness before the men and women of our day to the fact that God is Love, and that it is worth allowing oneself to be conquered and entranced in order to devote one's life exclusively to him (cf. Apostolic Exhortation Vita Consecrata, 15).

Religious life in Brazil has always been important and has had a key role in the work of evangelization, from the very beginnings of the colonial era.

Only yesterday, I had the great joy of presiding at the eucharistic celebration which included the canonization of Saint Antônio de Sant'Ana Galvão, a Franciscan priest and religious and the first saint to have been born in Brazil.

Alongside him, another admirable witness to the consecrated life is Saint Pauline, foundress of the Little Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. I could quote many other examples. May all of them together serve as an incentive to you to live out your total consecration. God bless you!

6. Today, on the eve of the opening of the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, at which it will be my pleasure to preside, I want to tell each of you how important it is to maintain our sense of belonging to the Church, which leads us to grow and to mature as brothers and sisters, children of the one God and Father.

My dear men and women of Latin America, I know that you have a great thirst for God. I know that you follow the Lord Jesus who said: "No one comes to the Father, but by me" (John 14:6).

The Pope therefore wants to say to all of you: The Church is our home! This is our home! In the Catholic Church we find all that is good, all that gives grounds for security and consolation! Anyone who accepts Christ, "the way, the truth and the life" in his totality, is assured of peace and happiness, in this life and in the next!

For this reason, the Pope has come here to pray and to bear witness with you all: It is worth being faithful, it is worth persevering in our faith!

The coherence of the faith also requires, however, a solid doctrinal and spiritual formation, which thus contributes to building a more just, humane and Christian society.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, together with its abridged version published under the title of "Compendium", will be of help here because of the clear notions it provides concerning our faith.

Let us ask straight away that the coming of the Holy Spirit may be for all people like a new Pentecost, so that it may illumine our hearts and our faith with the light that comes down from above.

7. It is with great hope that I turn to all of you assembled here within this majestic Basilica, and to all who took part in the Holy Rosary from outside, to invite you to become profoundly missionary and to bring the Good News of the Gospel to every point of the compass in Latin America and in the world.

Let us ask the Mother of God, Our Lady of Aparecida, to protect the lives of all Christians. May she, who is the Star of Evangelization, guide our steps along the path towards the heavenly Kingdom:

"Our Mother, protect the Brazilian and Latin American family! Guard under your protective mantle the children of this beloved land that welcomes us. As the Advocate with your Son Jesus, give to the Brazilian people constant peace and full prosperity.

"our out upon our brothers and sisters throughout Latin America a true missionary ardor, to spread faith and hope, make the resounding plea that you uttered in Fatima for the conversion of sinners become a reality that transforms the life of our society, and as you intercede, from the Shrine of Guadalupe, for the people of the Continent of Hope, bless its lands and its homes. Amen."

[Original text: Portuguese]
© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2007 5.08]

PLACEHOLDER FOR OTHER MISCELLANEA FROM 5/12/07

==



Tens of thousands await
pope's second open-air mass in Brazil

APARECIDA, Brazil (AFP) - Tens of thousands of pilgrims flooded the vast esplanade of the Aparecida basilica on Sunday for Pope Benedict XVI's second open-air mass of his landmark trip to Brazil.

A roar went up as the pontiff arrived in his Popemobile to inaugurate a two-week conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops that will set the course for the future of the Catholic Church in the region.

The windows of the Popemobile were rolled halfway down as the 80-year-old German pontiff saluted the masses in this important sanctuary town.

Many pilgrims had spent the night in the area huddled around bonfires singing religious songs and chanting "Bento, Bento" (Benedict in Portuguese).

Flags from Paraguay, Chile and Peru could be seen in the esplanade along with images of the Virgin Mary and signs from regional Catholic groups including the Legionnaires of Christ and Neocatechumenal.

"We are very moved to be able to see the pope," said Soledad Reynoso from Argentina.

The mass was set to begin at 10:00 am (1300 GMT). Later Sunday, the pope was to address the start of the bishops' conference, which is to focus on efforts to reinforce the missionary reach of the Church in the region, where it is competing with evangelical movements.

The Latin American region is home to nearly half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, but is under-represented in the Catholic hierarchy.

Nearly one million attended an open-air mass in Sao Paulo on Friday when the pope canonized Brazil's first saint.

Benedict is to leave for home on Sunday.



Pope wants strong Church in Latin America
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON

APARECIDA, Brazil, May 13 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI summoned his bishops from across Latin America to Brazil's holiest landmark on Sunday to enlist their help in keeping Catholicism the dominant religious force in the region.

While Brazil is the church's biggest stronghold on the planet, millions of Roman Catholics have joined evangelical Protestant churches in recent years, and the church's moral code is challenged across Latin America by traditionally Catholic populations flouting its prohibitions on abortion, divorce and premarital sex.

In his first visit to the region where half the world's Catholics live, Benedict spoke sternly to Brazil's bishops on Friday — and is expected to do again on Sunday when he opens a conference of Latin American bishops with an open-air Mass.

Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday morning streamed into a plaza outside Aparecida's basilica — home to Brazil's black Virgin Mary — to hear the Mass.

Saturday night, Benedict implored the Virgin Mary to "protect the Brazilian and Latin American family" and energize Latin America's priests and nuns with evangelical zeal.

"Pour out upon our brothers and sisters throughout Latin America a true missionary ardor, to spread faith and hope," Benedict said.

After stressing the church's moral teaching on abortion and sex during three days of events in Sao Paulo, South America's largest city, Benedict on Saturday turned to the issue of drug trafficking and its damage to society, threatening Latin American drug dealers with divine retribution.

"God will call you to account for your deeds," Benedict warned drug dealers to cheers from recovering drug addicts at the "Fazenda da Esperanca," or "Farm of Hope," drug treatment center near Aparecida.

Brazil and the rest of Latin America face dangerously high rates of drug abuse and traffickers must "reflect on the grave harm they are inflicting on countless young people and on adults from every level of society," Benedict said.

"Human dignity cannot be trampled upon in this way," the pope declared before a crowd of 6,000 outside the drug treatment center founded by a German-born Franciscan friar.

Benedict later prayed to Brazil's patron saint for help in restoring the church's eroding influence in Latin America's largest nation, where the number of Catholics has dropped sharply in recent decades while born-again Protestant congregations have added millions of faithful to their ranks.

While surveys show cocaine use has been relatively stable in Brazil for years, the violence continues unabated, driven by gangs that control street-corner dealing and the shipment of drugs made elsewhere in South America to Europe and the United States.

The violence is endemic in other Latin American countries including Colombia and Caribbean nations. In Mexico, gangs battling over billion-dollar drug smuggling routes into the United States leave a daily body count from beheadings, grenade attacks and execution-style killings.

But some doubted whether the pope's message to traffickers will have any effect.

"What the pope said is important for drug users, but religion doesn't matter to the dealers," said Felipe Kenji, 27, under treatment at the center since December. "They'll only stop selling drugs when they die."

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

The pope will leave Aparecida for Rome after addressing the bishops, but they will spend another two weeks trying to determine how to reverse the church's losses.

The black Virgin Mary, Brazil's patron saint, is a three-foot-tall wooden statue pulled from a river in the 18th century by poor fishermen who were not catching any fish, and then caught loads in their nets.

Miracles were subsequently attributed to the statue, and so many pilgrims flocked to Aparecida that a basilica was built. It was inaugurated as a shrine in 1955.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 22.05]

Pope calls troubled Latin America
"Continent of Hope"
By Terry Wade and Todd Benson


APARECIDA, Brazil, May 12 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict called Latin America "the Continent of Hope" on Sunday in a mass at Brazil's holiest shrine as he tried to revive the Roman Catholic Church's waning influence in the region.

About 150,000 faithful gathered outside the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida, one of the world's largest cathedrals, to hear the Pope deliver a traditional mass on the final day of his first visit to the Americas.

"This is the faith that has made America the Continent of Hope," the Pope told followers from his throne under a white canopy in front of the basilica. "Not a political ideology, not a social movement, not an economic system."

The turnout, however, was far less than the 500,000 people expected by Church officials - an indication of the difficult times it faces in Latin America. In contrast, 1 million people march in an annual Evangelical rally in Sao Paulo.

Bishops from Latin America and Caribbean meet from Sunday for the next two weeks in Aparecida to talk over problems ranging from a shortage of priests to the loss of Catholics to Protestant groups.

They will map out priorities for missionary work and social action in a region blighted by poverty, corruption, drug trafficking and violence. Pope Benedict will offer them guidance in an opening address later on Sunday.

Throughout his visit to Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic country, the 80-year-old Pontiff has demanded people return to strict family values and shun promiscuity. He has also stressed the Church's unwavering opposition to abortion.

The message has had a mixed reception in a country known for its enthusiastic attitude toward sex and where poverty and violence afflict many families. But in the crowd stretched out before the basilica, there was approval.

"This is a blessing. He spoke to young people and he reinforced family values. That is so important," said Nathalia Dos Reis, 45, a cleaner from nearby Guaratingueta.

Bishops said their meeting would tackle the problem of how to win people back to the Catholic Church. Latin America has nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics but millions have left for Protestant groups or abandoned religion altogether.

"We need to find ways to evangelize more effectively so that people become true Catholics," said Bishop Jose Antonio Tosi Marques from the Brazilian city of Fortaleza.

Bishop Erwin Krautler from the Amazon state of Para said the Church must do more to help the poor. "We often forget that the poor and landless have a right to a dignified life."

Krautler was a friend of Dorothy Stang, a U.S. nun murdered in Para in 2005 by ranchers opposed to her work with landless peasants in the Amazon.

He defended Liberation Theology, a movement in which Marxist-inspired priests allied themselves with the poor against military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope led a Vatican crackdown on the movement.

"The right to liberation is in the Bible. Liberation Theology is a purely Latin American aspect of the church that deserves respect," Krautler said.

The shrine at Aparecida, about 100 miles east of Sao Paulo, is visited each year by millions of pilgrims.

The red-brick basilica was inaugurated by Pope John Paul in 1980 and is the world's second-biggest after St. Peter's in Vatican City. It can hold 45,000 worshipers.

Street vendor Jose Cesar, 58, who was selling Pope Benedict watches and T-shirts outside the basilica, said the turnout on Sunday was less than stall-owners had expected.

"But having the Pope here still helps," he said.







Day Five:
Christ, not ideology,
creates a ‘continent of hope,’ pope says
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Aparecida, Brazil
Posted on May 13, 2007



Christ, not political ideology, is what will make Latin America “the continent of hope,” Pope Benedict XVI told the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean this morning in a Mass to open their Fifth General Conference.

“Not a political ideology, not a social movement, not an economic system,” the pope said. “Faith in the God who is love – who took flesh, died and rose in Jesus Christ – is the authentic basis for this hope.”

That claim has been Benedict’s constant theme over his May 9-13 trip to Brazil, which concludes today with the formal opening of the General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean (CELAM) in Aparecida, home to the largest Marian shrine in the southern hemisphere.

In a nutshell, Benedict has insisted that the urgent political and social problems of Latin America must not distract the church from the core of its mission, which is to proclaim the Risen Christ.

Only faith in Christ, the pope has argued repeatedly, will provide the lasting values upon which a truly “just and fraternal” society can be built.

While that’s a universal message, it is especially relevant in Latin America. Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), many Catholic theologians, priests, bishops and lay activists in Latin America have sought to mobilize the church to respond to the continent’s pressing social and political crises, above all the disparities between rich and poor – a gap which, according to United Nations statistics, is more dramatic in Latin America than anywhere else in the world.

The pope acknowledged that focusing on the spiritual dimension of the church’s life “must not serve as an excuse for avoiding the historical reality in which the church lives as she shares the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially those who are poor and afflicted.”

Yet Benedict has insisted that this social solidarity must not dislodge proclamation of Christ, participation in the sacraments, and the promotion of holiness as the heart of Catholic identity. It is not the role of the church to provide specific political solutions to Latin America’s problems, the pope has said, but rather to provide the evangelical “motor fuel” for a commitment to finding those solutions.

For the third time over the course of his five-day trip, Benedict said that real peace is to be found only in Christ, “the peace that the world cannot give.” He said that faith in God is Latin America's "most precious inheritance."

In his homily this morning at the Sanctuary of Aparecida, Benedict also again invoked the image of Pentecost in praying for a new burst of evangelizing and missionary activity in Latin America.

In addressing the bishops, Benedict reminded them of the “Council of Jerusalem” as described in the Acts of the Apostles, which ended with a decision not to impose to Mosaic Law upon converts from paganism. The decision was announced by the formula, “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us …”

That formula, the pope said, expresses the method by which decisions should be reached in the church, “whether in small gatherings or in great ones.”

“It reminds us of the importance of community discernment with regard to the great problems and issues encountered by the church along her way,” he said. “The church’s leaders discuss and argue, but in a constant attitude of religious openness to Christ’s word in the Holy Spirit.”

“It is not only a question of procedure,” Benedict said. “It is a reflection of the church’s very nature as a mystery of communion with Christ in the Holy Spirit.”

Benedict acknowledged that the CELAM conference is an especially important event in the life of the church, since the churches in Latin America “constitute, proportionally, the majority of the Catholic community.”

Against the backdrop of dramatic recent losses to Pentecostal and Evangelical movements, as well as the growing phenomenon of Latin Americans without any religious faith at all, Benedict insisted that the Catholic Church must not grow by “proselytism.” Instead, he said, it must grow by “attraction,” through spiritual and practical imitation of Christ.

In Catholic parlance, “proselytism” is understood to mean aggressive, and often manipulative, efforts to coerce people into embracing a given religious option.

“Evangelization” and “mission,” on the other hand, are invoked to mean respectful efforts to share Christ with others, both through explicit proclamation and also through service, leaving people free to make up their own minds.

Hence “proselytism” is used in a pejorative sense, often in reference to what Catholics call the Pentecostal and Evangelical “sects,” while “evangelization” is regarded as an urgent pastoral priority.

The Mass was held outside the sanctuary, in order to accommodate a crowd that was supposed to number over one million. (A trip guide published by Vatican Radio said “over one million are expected.”)

In the end, it was much smaller, estimated at perhaps 250,000 to 300,000. Local authorities offered three explanations for the disappointing turnout: Sunday is Mother’s Day in Brazil, so many people may have opted to be with their family; the events in São Paulo were overwhelming, perhaps intimidating some people; and that media coverage of the Mass was so extensive that many Brazilians were satisfied to watch it on television.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 19.01]

In Brazil, Pope urges bishops to action
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON


APARECIDA, Brazil, May 13 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI called Latin America the "continent of hope" in an open-air mass at Brazil's most holy shrine Sunday and urged the region's bishops to be zealous missionaries to reverse Catholicism's declining influence in the region.

As hundreds of choir members sang hymns and the faithful waved flags from all corners of South America, the German-born pope said the bishops must be "courageous and effective" to ensure the future strength of the church.

"This is the faith that has made Latin America the 'continent of hope,'" Benedict told the crowd of nearly 150,000 gathered outside the mammoth basilica of Aparecida.

The turnout fell far short of the 400,000 to 500,000 worshippers local organizers had hoped would show up for Benedict's last public event of his five-day trip in Brazil, the largest Roman Catholic nation in the world.

Before heading back to Rome Sunday night, Benedict was expected to address the bishops again as they open an important two-week regional conference, laying down his strategy to combat defections by millions of Catholics joining evangelical Protestant churches in recent years.

The church also faces huge Latin American challenges to its moral code from traditionally Catholic populations flouting its prohibitions on abortion, divorce and premarital sex.

The issue is crucial for the Vatican. While Latin America's largest nation is home to more than 120 million of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, Brazil's census shows the percentage of citizens characterizing themselves as Catholics plunged to 74 percent in 2000 from 89 percent in 1980. The ranks of those calling themselves evangelical Protestants rose to 15 percent from 7 percent.

Benedict said the church was not a political ideology or a social system, an apparent reference to his vehement opposition to the liberation theology movement in Latin America that he moved to crush while he was a cardinal working for his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

Liberation theology, which is based on a Marxist analysis of society, holds that criticizing the oppression of the poor and marginalized should be central to Christian theology, and that the Christian faith should be reinterpreted specifically to deliver oppressed people from injustice.

But Benedict insisted that the church shares the concerns of all people, "especially those who are poor or afflicted." That is a key issue in Brazil, where the divide between rich and poor is among the worst in the world.

Speaking in Portuguese, Spanish, English and French, Benedict got cheers from the faithful clogging a vast plaza outside the basilica — home to Brazil's patron saint, a black Virgin Mary.

Trying to catch a glimpse of the pope as he sat on a wooden throne underneath a white canopy, 68-year-old Maria Costa said Brazilians needed to hear Benedict's message, and that his five-day visit could halt the erosion of Catholicism in Brazil.

"It should help revitalize the church," she said. "Catholics weren't feeling very good with the church, and that's why so many were leaving. And I think that could change now. Let's hope so."

Alexandra Aparecida, an 18-year-old student, said it's crucial for young Brazilians to "have more faith" to stem the church's losses and predicted the pope's visit will help.

We need to be guided, and the pope is helping us a lot by coming here and giving us his message," she said. "He tells us what to do and we will listen."

The black Virgin Mary is a 3-foot wooden statue pulled from a river in the 18th century by poor fishermen who were not catching any fish, and then suddenly caught loads in their nets. Miracles were subsequently attributed to the statue, and so many pilgrims flocked to Aparecida that a basilica was built. It was inaugurated as a shrine in 1955.




Church grows by attraction,
not proselytism, Pope says


Aparecida, May 13, 2007 CNA)- The Church grows by the energy of Christ’s love and not by the power of ideologies, Pope Benedict XVI said on Sunday morning, during the [Mass preceding the]inauguration of the 5th General Conference of Latin American Bishops at the Marian shrine of Aparecida, Brazil.

Addressing a crowd of more than 300,000, including the some 200 Latin American cardinals and bishops arrived for the meeting that will last until May 31, the Pope said that “Mary welcomes us to this Upper Room and, as our Mother and Teacher, helps us to pray trustingly to God with one voice.”

Commenting on the Sunday’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Pope Benedict said, “Church’s leaders discuss and argue, but in a constant attitude of religious openness to Christ’s word in the Holy Spirit.”

“This,” he said, “is the ‘method’ by which we operate in the Church, whether in small gatherings or in great ones. It is not only question of procedure: it is a reflection of the Church’s very nature as a mystery of communion with Christ in the Holy Spirit.”

The Latin American Bishops will discuss the future of the new evangelization in the region and will draft a document aimed at guiding their pastoral policies for the next decade.

Addressing the Latin American Bishops, the Pope said, “To you who represent the Church in Latin America, today I symbolically entrust my Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, in which I sought to point out to everyone the essence of the Christian message.”

He then explained that the Church “does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by ‘attraction’,” “just as Christ draws all to himself by the power of his love.”

Benedict XVI stressed then that “this is the priceless treasure that is so abundant in Latin America, this is her most precious inheritance: faith in the God who is Love, who has shown us his face in Jesus Christ.”

“This is the faith that has made America the Continent of Hope. Not a political ideology, not a social movement, not an economic system: faith in the God who is Love,” the Pope added, sparking a long applause from the crowd that included large delegations from South American countries.

The Pontiff went on to remind those present, “Pope John Paul II called you to a new evangelization, and you accepted his commission with your customary generosity and commitment.”

“I now confirm it with you, and in the words of this Fifth Conference I say to you: be faithful disciples, so as to be courageous and effective missionaries!”

“Through the prayers of the Virgin Mary, may the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean be abundantly clothed with power from on high,” he said in closing.

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

Pope says Latin America needs
'courageous, effective missionaries'
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service


APARECIDA, Brazil (CNS) - Celebrating Mass at Latin America's biggest Marian shrine, Pope Benedict XVI said the church needs "courageous and effective missionaries" to revitalize the region's Christian identity.

More than political platforms or social movements, it is the church's promotion of faith in Christ that will bring relief to the suffering and needy, the pope said May 13.

"This is the priceless treasure that is so abundant in Latin America, this is her most precious inheritance: faith in the God who is love, who has shown us his face in Jesus Christ," he said.

The pope was winding up a five-day visit to Brazil with a series of events aimed at all of Latin America. The Mass, attended by about 150,000 people on an esplanade in front of the Basilica of Our Lady Aparecida, opened the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The evening before, inside the basilica, the pope gave a spiritual pep talk to Catholic priests, seminarians, religious and lay leaders, proclaiming: "The church is our home. This is our home. In the Catholic Church we find all that is good."

In both liturgies, the pope emphasized the centrality of Christ in the church's work of evangelization and social justice.

At the same time, he seemed to distinguish between the Catholic Church's missionary approach and the aggressive proselytizing by evangelical sects, which have flourished in Latin America.

"The church does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by attraction," the pope said at the Mass.

By living charity day in and day out, he said, Christians release "an irresistible power which is the power of holiness."

"This is the faith that has made America the 'continent of hope.' Not a political ideology, not a social movement, not an economic system: faith in the God who is love," he said, drawing applause from the crowd.

The pope added that the church's faith in eternal salvation does not blind it to the "grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted." Indeed, he said, church members are called upon to work in this world "in charity and in charity alone."

The pope read his homily in Portuguese while seated on a wooden throne before a giant sketch of Christ. He looked alert and sounded good on the last day of a trip that began May 9 in Sao Paulo, Brazil's biggest city.

Many of the faithful, who shaded themselves from the sun with umbrellas, had arrived at dawn for the Aparecida liturgy. Although church officials had expected half a million people, the crowd appeared considerably smaller than that.

The pope personally chose Aparecida as the site for the bishops' meeting to underline the region's devotion to Mary. More than 7 million pilgrims arrive each year at the shrine, built near a spot where fishermen pulled an image of Mary from a river in the 18th century.

At the Mass, he said the liturgy would place the bishops' general conference "on the firm basis of prayer and the Eucharist."

The pope said that, as in the early Christian centuries, when church leaders come together they should do so in the spirit of "community discernment," able to discuss and argue about issues, but in an attitude of openness to the Holy Spirit.

"This is the 'method' by which we operate in the church, whether in small gatherings or in great ones," he said.

On May 12, the pope prayed the rosary with thousands of pastoral workers and lay movement members who packed the basilica. In a talk that was repeatedly interrupted by applause, the pontiff drew a big cheer when he told them simply: "The pope loves you."

He emphasized that the church's message is a saving one.

"Anyone who accepts Christ - 'the way, the truth and the life' - in his totality is assured of peace and happiness, in this life and in the next," he said.

"For this reason, the pope has come here to pray and to bear witness with you all: It is worth being faithful, it is worth persevering in our faith," he said.

Touching on a common theme of his trip, he said strong faith must be based on a solid doctrinal and spiritual formation. He encouraged widespread use of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its accompanying compendium.







THE POPE'S MESSAGE AT 'REGINA CAELI TODAY:
'Parents, pray with your children'


Aparecida, May 13, 2007 (CNA)- During the Regina Caeli prayer following the Mass celebrated at the Marian shrine of Aparecida in Brazil, Pope Benedict XVI said that the family stands at the heart of the Church.

The same day in which the 4th Congress of Families was being closed in Warsaw (Poland,) and one day after Italians held a massive “Family Day” in Rome to protect families from controversial legislation, Pope Benedict greeted the English-speaking groups present at Aparecida with words of encouragement of family life.

“Families stand at the heart of the Church’s mission of evangelization, for it is in the home that our life of faith is first expressed and nurtured.”

“Parents,” he said, “you are the primary witnesses to your children of the truths and values of our faith: pray with and for your children; teach them by your example of fidelity and joy!”

“Indeed,” the Pope continued, “every disciple, spurred on by word and strengthened by sacrament, is called to mission. It is a duty from which no one should shy away, for nothing is more beautiful than to know Christ and to make him known to others! May Our Lady of Guadalupe be your model and guide. God bless you all!”

During the praying of the Regina Caeli the Pope recalled the ninetieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima.

“With their powerful call to conversion and penance,” he said, “they are without doubt the most prophetic of all modern apparitions. Let us ask the Mother of the Church, who knows the sufferings and hopes of humanity, to protect our homes and our communities.”

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 23.29]

I must apologize that I am only able to post photos from the Yahoo newsphoto service by way of 'news' reporting and a more-or-less comprehensive photo account of an event. It remains for the more experienced members to come up with the better, larger pictures.

Friday and Saturday, I only had time to do the 'essentials' for this thread - and for some strange reason, nobody else in the English section posted anything either [WHERE IS EVERYONE?] - but thankfully, I find I have a little time now before the stories on the conference opening (though it's still not easy to work from a strange computer in an office next to a hospital ICU).

Here's Paparatzifan's photo selection in the main forum from the Mass in Aparecida.

Here is the Vatican translation of the homily delivered by Pope Benedict XVI at the Mass to inaugurate the 5th General Conference of CELAM on Sunday, May 13. The homily was delivered in Portuguese and Spanish:



Dear Brother Bishops,
Dear priests, and all of you, brothers and sisters in the Lord!

There are no words to express my joy in being here with you to celebrate this solemn Eucharist on the occasion of the opening of the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean.

I greet each of you most warmly, particularly Archbishop Raymundo Damasceno Assis, whom I thank for the words he addressed to me in the name of the entire assembly, and the Cardinal Presidents of this General Conference.

My respectful greeting goes to the civil and military Authorities who have honoured us with their presence.

From this Shrine my thoughts reach out, full of affection and prayer, to all those who are spiritually united with us, especially the communities of consecrated life, the young people belonging to various associations and movements, the families, and also the sick and the elderly. To all I say: "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 1:3).

I see it as a special gift of Providence that this Holy Mass is being celebrated at this time and in this place. The time is the liturgical season of Easter; on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, as Pentecost rapidly approaches, the Church is called to intensify her prayer for the coming of the Holy Spirit. The place is the National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, the Marian heart of Brazil:

Mary welcomes us to this Upper Room and, as our Mother and Teacher, helps us to pray trustingly to God with one voice. This liturgical celebration lays a most solid foundation for the Fifth Conference, setting it on the firm basis of prayer and the Eucharist, Sacramentum Caritatis.

Only the love of Christ, poured out by the Holy Spirit, can make this meeting an authentic ecclesial event, a moment of grace for this Continent and for the whole world. This afternoon I will be able to discuss more fully the implications of the theme of your Conference.

But now, let us leave space for the word of God which we have the joy of receiving with open and docile hearts, like Mary, Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, so that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ may once again take flesh in the "today" of our history.

The first reading, taken from the Acts of the Apostles, refers to the so-called 'Council of Jerusalem', which dealt with the question as to whether the observance of the Mosaic Law was to be imposed on those pagans who had become Christians. The reading leaves out the discussion between "the apostles and the elders" (vv. 4-21) and reports the final decision, which was then written down in the form of a letter and entrusted to two delegates for delivery to the community in Antioch (vv. 22-29).

This passage from Acts is highly appropriate for us, since we too are assembled here for an ecclesial meeting. It reminds us of the importance of community discernment with regard to the great problems and issues encountered by the Church along her way.

These are clarified by the "apostles" and "elders" in the light of the Holy Spirit, who, as today’s Gospel says, calls to mind the teaching of Jesus Christ (cf. Jn 14:26) and thus helps the Christian community to advance in charity towards the fullness of truth (cf. Jn 16:13). The Church’s leaders discuss and argue, but in a constant attitude of religious openness to Christ’s word in the Holy Spirit. Consequently, at the end they can say: "it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…" (Acts 15:28).

This is the "method" by which we operate in the Church, whether in small gatherings or in great ones. It is not only question of procedure: it is a reflection of the Church’s very nature as a mystery of communion with Christ in the Holy Spirit.

In the case of the General Conferences of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, the first, held in 1955 in Rio de Janeiro, merited a special Letter from Pope Pius XII, of venerable memory; in later Conferences, including the present one, the Bishop of Rome has travelled to the site of the continental gathering in order to preside over its initial phase.

With gratitude and devotion let us remember the Servants of God Paul VI and John Paul II, who brought to the Conferences of Medellín, Puebla and Santo Domingo the witness of the closeness of the universal Church to the Churches in Latin America, which constitute, proportionally, the majority of the Catholic community.

"To the Holy Spirit and to us". This is the Church: we, the community of believers, the People of God, with its Pastors who are called to lead the way; together with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father, sent in the name of his Son Jesus, the Spirit of the one who is "greater" than all, given to us through Christ, who became "small" for our sake.

The Paraclete Spirit, our Ad-vocatus, Defender and Consoler, makes us live in God’s presence, as hearers of his word, freed from all anxiety and fear, bearing in our hearts the peace which Jesus left us, the peace that the world cannot give (cf. Jn 14:26-27).

The Spirit accompanies the Church on her long pilgrimage between Christ’s first and second coming. "I go away, and I will come to you" (Jn 14:28), Jesus tells his Apostles. Between Christ’s "going away" and his "return" is the time of the Church, his Body.

Two thousand years have passed so far, including these five centuries and more in which the Church has made her pilgrim way on the American Continent, filling believers with Christ’s life through the sacraments and sowing in these lands the good seed of the Gospel, which has yielded thirty, sixty and a hundredfold.

The time of the Church, the time of the Spirit: the Spirit is the Teacher who trains disciples: he teaches them to love Jesus; he trains them to hear his word and to contemplate his countenance; he conforms them to Christ’s sacred humanity, a humanity which is poor in spirit, afflicted, meek, hungry for justice, merciful, pure in heart, peacemaking, persecuted for justice’s sake (cf. Mt 5:3-10).

By the working of the Holy Spirit, Jesus becomes the "Way" along which the disciple walks. "If a man loves me, he will keep my word", Jesus says at the beginning of today’s Gospel. "The word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me" (Jn 14:23-24).

Just as Jesus makes known the words of the Father, so the Spirit reminds the Church of Christ’s own words (cf. Jn 14:26). And just as love of the Father led Jesus to feed on his will, so our love for Jesus is shown by our obedience to his words. Jesus’ fidelity to the Father’s will can be communicated to his disciples through the Holy Spirit, who pours the love of God into their hearts (cf. Rom 5:5).

The New Testament presents Christ as the missionary of the Father. Especially in the Gospel of John, Jesus often speaks of himself in relation to the Father who sent him into the world. And so in today’s Gospel he says: "the word which you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me" (Jn 14:24).

At this moment, dear friends, we are invited to turn our gaze to him, for the Church’s mission exists only as a prolongation of Christ’s mission: "As the Father has sent me, even so I send you" (Jn 20:21). The evangelist stresses, in striking language, that the passing on of this commission takes place in the Holy Spirit: "he breathed on them and said to them: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’" (Jn 20:22).

Christ’s mission is accomplished in love. He has kindled in the world the fire of God’s love (cf. Lk 12:49). It is Love that gives life: and so the Church has been sent forth to spread Christ’s Love throughout the world, so that individuals and peoples "may have life, and have it abundantly" (Jn 10:10).

To you, who represent the Church in Latin America, today I symbolically entrust my Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, in which I sought to point out to everyone the essence of the Christian message.

The Church considers herself the disciple and missionary of this Love: missionary only insofar as she is a disciple, capable of being attracted constantly and with renewed wonder by the God who has loved us and who loves us first (cf. 1 Jn 4:10).

The Church does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by "attraction": just as Christ "draws all to himself" by the power of his love, culminating in the sacrifice of the Cross, so the Church fulfils her mission to the extent that, in union with Christ, she accomplishes every one of her works in spiritual and practical imitation of the love of her Lord.

Dear brothers and sisters! This is the priceless treasure that is so abundant in Latin America, this is her most precious inheritance: faith in the God who is Love, who has shown us his face in Jesus Christ.

You believe in the God who is Love: this is your strength, which overcomes the world, the joy that nothing and no one can ever take from you, the peace that Christ won for you by his Cross!

This is the faith that has made America the "Continent of Hope." Not a political ideology, not a social movement, not an economic system: faith in the God who is Love — who took flesh, died and rose in Jesus Christ — is the authentic basis for this hope which has brought forth such a magnificent harvest from the time of the first evangelization until today, as attested by the ranks of Saints and Beati whom the Spirit has raised up throughout the Continent.

Pope John Paul II called you to a new evangelization, and you accepted his commission with your customary generosity and commitment. I now confirm it with you, and in the words of this Fifth Conference I say to you: be faithful disciples, so as to be courageous and effective missionaries.

The second reading sets before us the magnificent vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. It is an image of awesome beauty, where nothing is superfluous, but everything contributes to the perfect harmony of the holy City. In his vision John sees the city "coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God" (Rev 21:10).

And since the glory of God is Love, the heavenly Jerusalem is the icon of the Church, utterly holy and glorious, without spot or wrinkle (cf. Eph 5:27), permeated at her heart and in every part of her by the presence of the God who is Love.

She is called a "bride", "the bride of the Lamb" (Rev 20:9), because in her is fulfilled the nuptial figure which pervades biblical revelation from beginning to end. The City and Bride is the locus of God’s full communion with humanity; she has no need of a temple or of any external source of light, because the indwelling presence of God and of the Lamb illuminates her from within.

This magnificent icon has an eschatological value: it expresses the mystery of the beauty that is already the essential form of the Church, even if it has not yet arrived at its fullness. It is the goal of our pilgrimage, the homeland which awaits us and for which we long.

Seeing that beauty with the eyes of faith, contemplating it and yearning for it, must not serve as an excuse for avoiding the historical reality in which the Church lives as she shares the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially those who are poor or afflicted (cf. Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 1).

If the beauty of the heavenly Jerusalem is the glory of God —his love in other words — then it is in charity, and in charity alone, that we can approach it and to a certain degree dwell within it even now. Whoever loves the Lord Jesus and keeps his word, already experiences in this world the mysterious presence of the Triune God.

We heard this in the Gospel: "we will come to him and make our home with him" (Jn 14:23). Every Christian is therefore called to become a living stone of this splendid "dwelling place of God with men". What a magnificent vocation!

A Church totally enlivened and impelled by the love of Christ, the Lamb slain for love, is the image within history of the heavenly Jerusalem, prefiguring the holy city that is radiant with the glory of God. It releases an irresistible missionary power which is the power of holiness.

Through the prayers of the Virgin Mary, may the Church in Latin America and the Caribbean be abundantly clothed with power from on high (cf. Lk 24:49), in order to spread throughout this Continent and the whole world the holiness of Christ. To him be glory, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.

[00684-02.01] [Original text: Plurilingual]


REMARKS BEFORE LEADING 'REGINA CAELI'
After the Mass, the Holy Father also led the faithful in the Regina Caeli, at which time he made the following remarks, in which he extended greetings to in various languages:


Dear Brothers and Sisters,

With great affection I greet all of you who have come from the four corners of Brazil, from Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as those who are listening to me via radio and television.

During the celebration of Mass, I invoked the Holy Spirit, asking him to make fruitful the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which I shall inaugurate shortly.

I ask you all to pray for the fruits of this great gathering, which opens up a future of hope for the Latin American family. You have a part to play in building your Nations' destiny. May God bless you and be with you!

I offer affectionate greetings to the Spanish-speaking groups and communities present today, and to all those in Spain and Latin America who are spiritually united with this celebration.

May the Virgin Mary help you to keep alive the flame of faith, love and harmony, so that by the witness of your lives and by faithfulness to your baptismal vocation, you may be light and hope for humanity.

Let us also pray that the celebration of this Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean will bear many fruits of authentic spiritual renewal and untiring evangelization. God bless you!

I warmly greet all the English-speaking groups present today. Families stand at the heart of the Church's mission of evangelization, for it is in the home that our life of faith is first expressed and nurtured.

Parents, you are the primary witnesses to your children of the truths and values of our faith: pray with and for your children; teach them by your example of fidelity and joy!

Indeed, every disciple, spurred on by word and strengthened by sacrament, is called to mission. It is a duty from which no one should shy away, for nothing is more beautiful than to know Christ and to make him known to others!

May Our Lady of Guadalupe be your model and guide. God bless you all!

Dear French-speaking families and groups, I greet with all my heart those of you who live on the South American Continent, especially in Haiti, in French Guiana and in the Antilles. May you build, in cooperation with others, a more generous and fraternal society, taking care to help young people discover the greatness of family values.

Today is the ninetieth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima. With their powerful call to conversion and penance, they are without doubt the most prophetic of all modern apparitions. Let us ask the Mother of the Church, who knows the sufferings and hopes of humanity, to protect our homes and our communities.

In a special way we entrust to her those peoples and nations that are in particular need, confident that she will not fail to heed the prayers we make to her with filial devotion.

I remember in a special way those brothers and sisters who suffer from hunger. In this regard I want to mention the "March against Hunger" promoted by the World Food Programme, the United Nations agency responsible for food assistance. This initiative is taking place today in many cities worldwide, including Ribeirão Preto here in Brazil.

Our prayers are offered also for the Afro-Brazilian community, who this Sunday are commemorating the abolition of slavery in Brazil. May this celebration foster a renewed sense of missionary outreach towards this highly significant socio-cultural group in the Land of the Holy Cross.

I also extend my warm greetings, together with my sincere gratitude, to all the groups and associations gathered here. May God reward you and keep you firm in the faith.

Let us now proclaim with joy the hymn of our salvation.

© Copyright 2007 - Libreria Editrice Vaticana

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/05/2007 17.52]

The Pope greets CELAM president Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, from Chile.






Pope criticizes 'authoritarian'
governments in Latin America


APARECIDA, Brazil, May 13 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI on Sunday criticized unnamed "authoritarian governments" in Latin America and the Caribbean as he opened a key conference of the region's bishops.

Despite "notable progress towards democracy ... there are grounds for concern in the face of authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies that we thought had been superseded," he said.

Without naming the governments, he said they "do not correspond to the Christian vision of man and society."

A new generation of left-wing leaders in Latin America includes Evo Morales of Bolivia, the first indigenous head of state who is trying to carry out radical reforms, and Ecuador's Rafael Correa, an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, leader of the anti-capitalist camp.

The pope also called on countries that have adopted a "liberal economy" to redress "the ever-increasing sectors of society that find themselves oppressed by immense poverty or even despoiled of their own natural resources."

The pope said both the Marxist and capitalist systems, "the dominant tendencies of the last century," had committed a "most destructive error ... as we can see from the results."

"Anyone who excludes God from his horizons ... can only end up in blind alleys or with recipes for destruction," he said, drawing applause from the bishops, who are to meet for the next two weeks.

"Just structures are ... an indispensable condition for a just society, but they neither arise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values," said the pontiff, who was to leave for home later Sunday.

"A society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values, even when they are in conflict with private interests," he added.

The defense of "moral values" and warnings against politicizing the Church have been a drumbeat of the pope's remarks since he arrived Wednesday for a five-day visit to Brazil, his first to the Americas since his election two years ago.

"If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice (by identifying) with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions," he said.

"Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere."

In the face of gaping economic inequalities in Latin America, large sections of the Church in the region remain under the influence of liberation theology, a movement with Marxist roots that was condemned by the Vatican in the 1970s and 1980s. [The Vatican did not condemn the entire movement, just the Marxist part of it and the relegation if not negation of Christ's divinity.] The movement advocates Church activism for the poor and oppressed to influence political change.

Benedict also rejected accusations that the Church was responsible for the destruction of pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas.

"The proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," he said.

"Authentic cultures ... are open, or better still, they are seeking an encounter with other cultures," he said.

"The Utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbus religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal Church, would not be a step forward: indeed, it would be a step back."




Pope decries rich-poor gap
in Latin America
By Philip Pullella and Terry Wade


APARECIDA, Brazil, May 13 (Reuters) - Pope Benedict decried the growing gap between rich and poor in Latin America on Sunday but said priests must stay out of politics even as they fight for social justice.

The Pope also told bishops from across Latin America and the Caribbean to do more to confront challenges threatening the Roman Catholic Church in the region, including the defection of millions of followers to Protestant churches.

He was speaking on the last day of a visit to Brazil, where he has tried to revive the Church's waning influence in a continent where priests stood alongside the first Spanish and Portuguese explorers five centuries ago.

Earlier, about 150,000 faithful gathered outside the huge Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida in this holy shrine city to hear the Pope deliver a traditional mass.

The turnout, however, was far less than the 500,000 people expected by Church officials - an indication of the difficult times it faces in the world's largest Catholic nation.

The Pope's speech to bishops who meet in conference here for the next two weeks was eagerly awaited as a signpost for the Church in Latin America, home to nearly half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics.

"The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have the right to a full life, proper to the children of God, under conditions that are human, free from the threat of hunger and from every form of violence," the Pope said.

He said the gap between rich and poor was getting worse, causing a loss of dignity through drugs, alcohol "and deceptive illusions of happiness."

The Pope's commitment to the poor was likely to be welcomed by priests working in Latin America's notorious slums.

Many have seen him as a conservative figure more concerned with enforcing a hard-line doctrine and remember him for leading a Vatican crackdown on the Liberation Theology movement of left-wing priests in the 1980s.

He warned again on Sunday that pastoral work and politics do not mix. "Capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures ... and this ideological promise has been proved false."

The Pope also offered a view of the Church's history in Latin America that may prove to be controversial.

He said indigenous peoples had welcomed the arrival of European priests as they had been "silently longing" for the Christian faith. Embracing it had purified them, he said.

Many Indian rights groups believe the conquest brought them enslavement and genocide.

Throughout his visit to Brazil, the Pope has demanded that people return to strict family values and shun promiscuity. He has stressed a stern opposition to abortion and birth control.

The message has had a mixed reception in a country known for its enthusiastic attitude toward sex and where the daily struggle to survive is the main worry for many families. But in the crowd stretched out before the basilica for the morning mass, there was approval.

"This is a blessing. He spoke to young people and he reinforced family values. That is so important," said Nathalia Dos Reis, a cleaner who attended Sunday's mass.

The bishops' conference will grapple with problems ranging from a shortage of priests to the growing appeal of Protestant groups.

They will also map out priorities for missionary work and social action in a region blighted by poverty, corruption, drug trafficking and violence.

While Latin America's Church has become more conservative since the 1980s, some still defend Liberation Theology and say priests must do more to help the poor.

"The right to liberation is in the Bible," Bishop Erwin Krautler from Brazil's Amazon state of Para told Reuters. "We often forget that the poor and landless have a right to a dignified life."



The Pope greets Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires -
the first time both have been photographed together since
it was reported in 2005 that Bergoglio was the only cardinal
who got a respectable number of votes in the early rounds
to counter Ratzinger's obvious lead going into the Conclave.
In the third balloting, he is said to have gotten close to
40 votes, although he himself went into the Conclave as one
of Ratzinger's Latin American supporters.


The Pope greets Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino,
Archbishop of Havana, Cuba .

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2007 3.09]

John Allen almost wraps up a most remarkable coverage of the Papal visit during which he managed to file at least three stories a day, usually with background information and context that other MSM reporters fail to take into account or simply ignore or do not know.

These two pieces on the Pope's final address of the Brazilian visit exemplify this conscientious, exemplary journalist's approach to his profession. God bless him, and may his tribe increase. Who else but he would have referred back to the Pope's great-uncle, a 19th-century Bavarian who was militant for social reform in behalf of the poor and the weak?

Day Five:
Pope raps Capitalism, Marxism
as 'blind alleys' in a world without God
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Aparecida, Brazil
Posted on May 13, 2007



Pope Benedict XVI closed his five-day trip to Brazil with a speech that, in some ways, he has been waiting thirty years to give. Its heart was that attempts to solve social and political problems without Christ lead to ruin – and, he said, the 20th century offered spectacular examples in the failures of both Marxism and capitalism.

Preaching Christ, the pope implied, is not a distraction from working for justice – it is working for justice.

In a 6,000 word address to open the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, the pope said that both of the main ideological rivals of the recent past, Marxism and capitalism, failed to deliver on their promises for building a better world, because both have tried to do so without reference to God.

“Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves; they declared that not only would they have no need of any prior individual morality, but that they would promote a communal morality,” the pope said. “And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it.”

The pope’s message in Brazil matured over a long period of theological reflection.

It was almost 30 years ago, in 1968, that the bishops of Latin America famously declared a “preferential option for the poor,” and no nation embraced that credo with greater zest than Brazil. As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and now as pope, Joseph Ratzinger has been wrestling with the issues raised by liberation theology, for which Brazil is the primary laboratory, ever since.

Liberation theology pioneered the notion of “structural sin,” meaning the sinfulness embedded in social, economic and political structures that perpetuate situations of injustice. Benedict agreed with the diagnosis, saying that “just structures are a condition without which a just order in society is not possible.”

In his address to CELAM, Benedict even endorsed the “preferential option for the poor,” saying it is implicit in the “Christological faith in the God who became poor for us.”

The key question, Benedict said, is not whether just structures are desirable, but rather where they come from. His answer was that they can only come from the spiritual and moral values provided by religious faith.

Benedict said that the failures of both Marxism and capitalism illustrate his point.

“The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit. And we can also see the same thing happening in the West, where the distance between rich and poor is growing constantly, and giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.”

In that light, Benedict said, the greatest contribution the Catholic church can make is to credibly and passionately proclaim Christ. People who order their lives on Christ, he argued, naturally pursue the values of peace and justice.

“Where God is absent – God with the human face of Jesus Christ – these values fail to show themselves with their full force, and a consensus does not arise concerning them,” the pope said.

Benedict indicated that he didn’t mean to say non-Christians can’t contribute to a just society. Yet, he argued, the tug of egoism, private gain, and indifference to the suffering of others is simply too strong for a society divided about its core principles.

“I do not mean that non-believers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality,” he said. “I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values, even when they are in conflict with private interests.”

Supplying faith and values, not direct political solutions, is therefore the contribution of the church, Benedict said.

“If the church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice,” the pope said, “because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions."

"The church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere.”

Surveying the challenges facing Latin American Catholicism, Benedict acknowledged that both “the harmonious development of society” and “the Catholic identity of these peoples” are in jeopardy.

The former was a reference to the on-going problems of poverty and violence in Latin America, while the latter referred to dramatic losses the Catholic church has suffered to both Pentecostal and Evangelical movements, as well as a growing number of people who say they have no religious faith at all.

Benedict began by saying that under the weight of disillusionment with modernity, some Latin Americans long for a return to a pre-Western culture, including pre-Christian religion. But Christianity, the pope argued, was not an “imposition” on indigenous cultures, but rather a way of “purifying” them that maintained the best elements of those cultures – elements which survive, he suggested, in the popular religiosity for which Latin American Catholicism is well-known.

“The utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbus religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal church, would not be a step forward,” Benedict said. “In reality, it would a retreat towards a stage in history anchored in the past.”

Neither, however, does modern globalization offer a satisfactory response to the needs of society, Benedict said, citing “the risk of vast monopolies and of treating profit as the supreme value.”

The pope said that “the liberal economy of some Latin American countries must take account of equity, because of the ever increasing sectors of society that find themselves oppressed by immense poverty or even despoiled of their own natural resources.”

At the same time, he suggested, populist left-wing movements today associated with Latin American nations such as Venezuela and Bolivia are not the answer, referring to “authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies that we thought had been superseded.”

The pope catalogued a series of what he sees as other dead-end roads, including “secularism, hedonism, indifferentism, and proselytism by numerous sects, animist religions and new pseudo-religious phenomena.”

Facing the urgent social justice challenges of Latin America, Benedict conceded that accenting Christ, the sacraments, and the spiritual life can seem like putting one’s head in the sand.

“Could this priority not perhaps be a flight towards emotionalism, towards religious individualism, an abandonment of the urgent reality of the great economic, social and political problems of Latin America and the world, and a flight from reality towards a spiritual world?” he asked rhetorically.

Precisely those accusations were sometimes made by liberation theologians against traditional forms of Catholic piety.

In fact, Benedict argued, the question presupposes a vision of reality that marginalizes God.

“This was precisely the great error of the dominant tendencies of the last century, a most destructive error, as we can see from the results of both Marxist and capitalist systems,” he said. “They falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality, which is God.” Doing so, he warned, is a “recipe for destruction.”

“Hence the unique and irreplaceable importance of Christ for us, for humanity,” the pope said. “If we do not know God in and with Christ, all of reality is transformed into an indecipherable enigma.”

To promote the centrality of Christ, Benedict recommended a renewed focus on the Bible, stronger catechesis and faith formation, greater use of the media, a deeper devotion to the Eucharist and commitment to Sunday Mass.

He also called on lay Catholics to be active in public life, in the media and in the universities, lamenting what he called a “notable absence” of committed Catholics in those spheres of life.

The pope singled five topics for special mention: the family, priests, men and women religious, the laity, and the young.

On the family, the pope warned against “secularism and ethical relativism,” leading to “civil legislation opposed to marriage, which, by supporting contraception and abortion, is threatening the future of peoples.” Benedict called on governments to adopt comprehensive pro-family policies.

The pope told lay men and women that they must consider themselves “jointly responsible,” along with their pastors, for “building society according to the criteria of the gospel.”

He advised the young to steer clear of “the facile illusions of instant happiness and the deceptive paradise offered by drugs, pleasure, and alcohol” and to “oppose every form of violence.”

Benedict also criticized currents in Latin American culture which do not recognize "the equal dignity and responsibility of women relative to men."

The Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean is taking place at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Aparecida, the largest Marian shrine in the southern hemisphere.

Coincidentally, the opening session also coincided with the 90th anniversary of the Marian apparitions in Fatima, Portugal.


Day Five:
Benedict's critique of capitalism no surprise
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Aparecida, Brazil
Posted on May 13, 2007


Benedict XVI’s stinging criticism of both Marxism and capitalism this afternoon may have caught some off-guard used to thinking of him as a consumate conservative, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows Joseph Ratzinger’s history.

“Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves; they declared that not only would they have no need of any prior individual morality, but that they would promote a communal morality,” the pope said this afternoon at the opening of the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean.

“And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it.”

That declaration builds on a lifetime of reflection.

In 1988, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published a collection of essays under the title of Church, Ecumenism and Politics. In it, he argued that capitalism is little better than national socialism or communism, in that all three propose false idols (prosperity, the Volk, and the state, respectively).

Ratzinger said that to build a humane civilization, the West must rediscover two elements of its past: its classical Greek heritage and its common Christian identity.

From the classical era, Ratzinger wrote, Europe should rediscover objective and eternal values that stand above politics, putting limits to power. Ratzinger used the Greek term eunomia to describe this concept of the good. In that sense, one could say that Ratzinger proposed a eunomic, rather than capitalist, model of Western culture.

Over the years, Ratzinger has been close to the Communio school within Catholic theology, which stresses the need for cultures to take their point of departure from the Christian gospel rather than secular ideologies.

Its primary exponents have repeatedly criticized capitalism for promoting an ethos of individualism and “survival of the fittest” that is at odds with the communitarian thrust of Catholic social teaching.

Since becoming pope, Benedict has often criticized what he considers the injustices of a growing neo-liberal system of economic globalization.

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.

It’s also worth noting that to some extent, skepticism about capitalism is built into Ratzinger’s DNA. His great uncle on his father's side, Georg Ratzinger, was one of the towering Bavarian figures of the nineteenth century, a Catholic monsignor with a strong track record of political and social engagement on behalf of the poor.

Georg Ratzinger’s best-known book was Die Volkswirthschaft in Ihren Sittlichen Grundlagen (“The economy in its ethical foundations”), published in 1881, which offered a critique of capitalism that reflected a growing body of Catholic social analysis which culminated in Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum.

George Ratzinger was twice elected to the Bavarian and the federal legislatures, and helped found a political party, the Bauerbund, which represented the interests of poor farmers against large capitalist industrial concerns. The Bauerbund stood for a mix of populist protectionism and progressive social measures such as child labor laws and minimum wages. The Bauerbund's chief goal was a system of social supports that would insulate poor farmers and small traders from the “boom and bust” cycles.

Benedict XVI has spoken warmly about his great-uncle’s political legacy. In 1996, he said: “As a representative of the state and national assemblies, he was really a champion of the rights of the peasants and the simple people in general. He fought – I’ve read this in the minutes of the state parliament – against child labor, which at that time was still considered a scandalous, impudent position to take. He was obviously a tough man. His achievements and his political standing also made everyone proud of him.”

Benedict XVI’s tough comments about the failures of capitalism at the opening of the CELAM general conference thus represent something of a family legacy.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/05/2007 23.42]

I had a moment of fame! I sent an email to EWTN and Raymond Arroyo read it out a few minutes ago. Willow heard it! I was in on my computer and missed it!
I've pasted the text on the Chatter thread, just in case I have any fans out there!!!! Pooh Bear is thrilled and has patted me on the back, as has my cat, Sixpence!!!!!


CONGRATS, MARY!!!! I just read Willow's note too....I'm green with envy about watching the TV coverage, as the worst part of my being tied up with an emergency is that I have been unable since Friday to watch anything on TV or on the Net, because the PC I have lucked on using is not equipped with a media player, and there is no TV by ICU...I have to watch everything later on video....TERESA

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2007 1.01]

Pope assails Marxism, capitalism
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON

APARECIDA, Brazil, May 13 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI blamed both Marxism and unbridled capitalism for Latin America's problems on Sunday, urging bishops to mold a new generation of Roman Catholic leaders in politics to reverse the church's declining influence in the region.

Ending a five-day trip to the most populous Catholic nation in the world, Benedict also warned that legalized contraception and abortion in Latin America threaten "the future of the peoples" and said the historic Catholic identity of the region is under assault.

Like his predecessor Pope John Paul II, Benedict criticized capitalism's negative effects as well as the Marxist influences that have motivated some grass-roots Catholic activists.

"The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit," he said in his opening address at a two-week bishops' conference in Brazil's holiest shrine city aimed at re-energizing the church's influence in Latin America.

He also warned of unfettered capitalism and globalization, blamed by many in Latin America for a deep divide between the rich and poor. The pope said it could give "rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness."

Benedict, speaking in Spanish and Portuguese to the bishops, also said Latin America needs more dedicated Catholics in leadership positions in politics, the media and at universities. He also said the church's leaders must halt a trend that has seen millions of Catholics turn into born-again Protestants or simply stop going to church.

While Brazil is home to more than 120 million of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, the census shows that people calling themselves Catholics fell to 74 percent in 2000 from 89 percent in 1980. Those calling themselves evangelical Protestants rose to 15 percent from 7 percent.

"It is true that one can detect a certain weakening of Christian life in society overall," Benedict said, blaming secularism, hedonism and proselytizers for other sects.

In Aparecida and at events earlier this week in Sao Paulo that attracted more than 1 million people, Benedict roundly denounced immorality in a bid to counter the rising tide of Latin Americans flouting the church's prohibition on premarital sex and divorce.

Now, he said, the bishops must convince Catholics from all walks of life "to bring the light of the Gospel into public life, into culture, economics and politics."

Benedict did not name any countries in his criticism of capitalism and Marxism, but Latin America has become deeply divided in recent years amid a sharp political tilt to the left — with the election of leftist leaders in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua and the overwhelming re-election in Venezuela of President Hugo Chavez, an avowed socialist.

Other countries, such as Brazil, have center-left leaders who have come under heavy criticism for embracing free market economic policies that have widened the rift between rich and poor.

Benedict called the institution of the family "one of the most important treasures of Latin American countries," but said it is threatened by legislation and government policies opposed to marriage, contraception and abortion.

Mexico City lawmakers recently legalized abortion and gay civil unions, and the Brazilian government routinely hands out millions of free condoms to prevent AIDS.

Before addressing the bishops, Benedict said Mass before 150,000 faithful in front of the mammoth basilica of Aparecida, home to the nation's patron saint, a black Virgin Mary. As hundreds of choir members sang hymns and people waved flags from all over South America, the pope called the region the "continent of hope" and said the bishops must be "courageous and effective missionaries" to ensure the strength of the church.

But the turnout fell far short of the 400,000 to 500,000 worshippers local organizers hoped would show up for Benedict's last big public event of the papal tour, his longest since becoming pope two years ago.

The 80-year-old pope also said the church needs to work harder to get its message across on the Internet, radio and television — methods used effectively by Protestant congregations attracting legions of followers, particularly in the vast slums ringing Brazil's largest cities.

Waiting to catch a glimpse of the Pope at Aparecida's basilica, 68-year-old Maria Costa said Brazilians needed to hear his message and she hoped his trip would revitalize the church.

"Catholics weren't feeling very good with the Church, and that's why so many were leaving," she said. "I think that could change now. Let's hope so."

Associated Press Writer Tales Azzoni and Alan Clendenning contributed to this report from Aparecida and Sao Paulo.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2007 0.56]

Here is the Vatican translation of the address delivered by the Holy Father in Spanish and Portuguese for the most past at the opening session of the V General Confrence of Latin American and Caribbean bishops.


Dear Brother Bishops, beloved priests, religious men and women and laypeople,
Dear observers from other religious confessions:

It gives me great joy to be here today with you to inaugurate the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which is being held close to the Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, Patroness of Brazil.

I would like to begin with words of thanksgiving and praise to God for the great gift of the Christian faith to the peoples of this Continent.

1. The Christian faith in Latin America

Faith in God has animated the life and culture of these nations for more than five centuries. From the encounter between that faith and the indigenous peoples, there has emerged the rich Christian culture of this Continent, expressed in art, music, literature, and above all, in the religious traditions and in the peoples’ whole way of being, united as they are by a shared history and a shared creed that give rise to a great underlying harmony, despite the diversity of cultures and languages.

At present, this same faith has some serious challenges to address, because the harmonious development of society and the Catholic identity of these peoples are in jeopardy.

In this regard, the Fifth General Conference is preparing to reflect upon this situation, in order to help the Christian faithful to live their faith with joy and coherence, to deepen their awareness of being disciples and missionaries of Christ, sent by him into the world to proclaim and to bear witness to our faith and love.

Yet what did the acceptance of the Christian faith mean for the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean? For them, it meant knowing and welcoming Christ, the unknown God whom their ancestors were seeking, without realizing it, in their rich religious traditions. Christ is the Saviour for whom they were silently longing.

It also meant that they received, in the waters of Baptism, the divine life that made them children of God by adoption; moreover, they received the Holy Spirit who came to make their cultures fruitful, purifying them and developing the numerous seeds that the incarnate Word had planted in them, thereby guiding them along the paths of the Gospel.

In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture.

Authentic cultures are not closed in upon themselves, nor are they set in stone at a particular point in history, but they are open, or better still, they are seeking an encounter with other cultures, hoping to reach universality through encounter and dialogue with other ways of life and with elements that can lead to a new synthesis, in which the diversity of expressions is always respected as well as the diversity of their particular cultural embodiment.

Ultimately, it is only the truth that can bring unity, and the proof of this is love. That is why Christ, being in truth the incarnate Logos, "love to the end", is not alien to any culture, nor to any person; on the contrary, the response that he seeks in the heart of cultures is what gives them their ultimate identity, uniting humanity and at the same time respecting the wealth of diversity, opening people everywhere to growth in genuine humanity, in authentic progress. The Word of God, in becoming flesh in Jesus Christ, also became history and culture.

The Utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbus religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal Church, would not be a step forward: indeed, it would be a step back. In reality, it would be a retreat towards a stage in history anchored in the past.

The wisdom of the indigenous peoples fortunately led them to form a synthesis between their cultures and the Christian faith which the missionaries were offering them. Hence the rich and profound popular religiosity, in which we see the soul of the Latin American peoples:

- Love for the suffering Christ, the God of compassion, pardon and reconciliation; the God who loved us to the point of handing himself over for us;

- Love for the Lord present in the Eucharist, the incarnate God, dead and risen in order to be the bread of life;

- The God who is close to the poor and to those who suffer;

- The profound devotion to the most holy Virgin of Guadalupe, the Aparecida, the Virgin invoked under various national and local titles.

When the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to the native Indian Saint Juan Diego, she spoke these important words to him: "Am I not your mother? Are you not under my shadow and my gaze? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not sheltered underneath my mantle, under the embrace of my arms?" (Nican Mopohua, Nos. 118-119).

This religiosity is also expressed in devotion to the saints with their patronal feasts, in love for the Pope and the other Pastors, and in love for the universal Church as the great family of God, that neither can nor ever should leave her children alone or destitute.

All this forms the great mosaic of popular piety which is the precious treasure of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and must be protected, promoted and, when necessary, purified.

2. Continuity with the other Conferences

This Fifth General Conference is being celebrated in continuity with the other four that preceded it: in Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, Puebla and Santo Domingo. With the same spirit that was at work there, the Bishops now wish to give a new impetus to evangelization, so that these peoples may continue to grow and mature in their faith in order to be the light of the world and witnesses to Jesus Christ with their own lives.

After the Fourth General Conference, in Santo Domingo, many changes took place in society. The Church which shares in the achievements and the hopes, the sufferings and the joys of her children, wishes to walk alongside them at this challenging time, so as to inspire them always with hope and comfort (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 1).

Today’s world experiences the phenomenon of globalization as a network of relationships extending over the whole planet. Although from certain points of view this benefits the great family of humanity, and a sign of its profound aspiration towards unity, nevertheless it also undoubtedly brings with it the risk of vast monopolies and of treating profit as the supreme value. As in all areas of human activity, globalization too must be led by ethics, placing everything at the service of the human person, created in the image and likeness of God.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in other regions, there has been notable progress towards democracy, although there are grounds for concern in the face of authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies that we thought had been superseded, and which do not correspond to the Christian vision of man and society as taught by the Social Doctrine of the Church.

On the other side of the coin, the liberal economy of some Latin American countries must take account of equity, because of the ever increasing sectors of society that find themselves oppressed by immense poverty or even despoiled of their own natural resources.

In the ecclesial communities of Latin America there is a notable degree of maturity in faith among the many active lay men and women devoted to the Lord, and there are also many generous catechists, many young people, new ecclesial movements and recently established Institutes of consecrated life.

Many Catholic educational, charitable or housing initiatives have proved essential. Yet it is true that one can detect a certain weakening of Christian life in society overall and of participation in the life of the Catholic Church, due to secularism, hedonism, indifferentism and proselytism by numerous sects, animist religions and new pseudo-religious phenomena.

All of this constitutes a new situation which will be analyzed here at Aparecida. Faced with new and difficult choices, the faithful are looking to this Fifth Conference for renewal and revitalization of their faith in Christ, our one Teacher and Saviour, who has revealed to us the unique experience of the infinite love of God the Father for mankind.

From this source, new paths and creative pastoral plans will be able to emerge, capable of instilling a firm hope for living out the faith joyfully and responsibly, and thus spreading it in one’s own surroundings.

3. Disciples and Missionaries

This General Conference has as its theme: "Disciples and Missionaries of Jesus Christ, so that our peoples may have life in him - I am the Way, the Truth and the Life" (John 14:6).

The Church has the great task of guarding and nourishing the faith of the People of God, and reminding the faithful of this Continent that, by virtue of their Baptism, they are called to be disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ. This implies following him, living in intimacy with him, imitating his example and bearing witness.

Every baptized person receives from Christ, like the Apostles, the missionary mandate: "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized, will be saved" (Mark 16:15). To be disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ and to seek life "in him" presupposes being deeply rooted in him.

What does Christ actually give us? Why do we want to be disciples of Christ? The answer is: because, in communion with him, we hope to find life, the true life that is worthy of the name, and thus we want to make him known to others, to communicate to them the gift that we have found in him. But is it really so? Are we really convinced that Christ is the way, the truth and the life?

In the face of the priority of faith in Christ and of life "in him", formulated in the title of this Fifth Conference, a further question could arise: could this priority not perhaps be a flight towards emotionalism, towards religious individualism, an abandonment of the urgent reality of the great economic, social and political problems of Latin America and the world, and a flight from reality towards a spiritual world?

As a first step, we can respond to this question with another: what is this "reality"? What is real? Are only material goods, social, economic and political problems "reality"?

This was precisely the great error of the dominant tendencies of the last century, a most destructive error, as we can see from the results of both Marxist and capitalist systems. They falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality which is God. Anyone who excludes God from his horizons falsifies the notion of "reality" and, in consequence, can only end up in blind alleys or with recipes for destruction.

The first basic point to affirm, then, is the following: only those who recognize God know reality and are able to respond to it adequately and in a truly human manner. The truth of this thesis becomes evident in the face of the collapse of all the systems that marginalize God.

Yet here a further question immediately arises: who knows God? How can we know him? We cannot enter here into a complex discussion of this fundamental issue. For a Christian, the nucleus of the reply is simple: only God knows God, only his Son who is God from God, true God, knows him. And he "who is nearest to the Father’s heart has made him known" (John 1:18). Hence the unique and irreplaceable importance of Christ for us, for humanity.

If we do not know God in and with Christ, all of reality is transformed into an indecipherable enigma; there is no way, and without a way, there is neither life nor truth.

God is the foundational reality, not a God who is merely imagined or hypothetical, but God with a human face; he is God-with-us, the God who loves even to the Cross. When the disciple arrives at an understanding of this love of Christ "to the end", he cannot fail to respond to this love with a similar love: "I will follow you wherever you go" (Luke 9:57).

We can ask ourselves a further question: what does faith in this God give us? The first response is: it gives us a family, the universal family of God in the Catholic Church.

Faith releases us from the isolation of the "I", because it leads us to communion: the encounter with God is, in itself and as such, an encounter with our brothers and sisters, an act of convocation, of unification, of responsibility towards the other and towards others.

In this sense, the preferential option for the poor is implicit in the Christological faith in the God who became poor for us, so as to enrich us with his poverty (cf. 2 Corinthians 8:9).

Yet before we consider what is entailed by the realism of our faith in the God who became man, we must explore the question more deeply: how can we truly know Christ so as to be able to follow him and live with him, so as to find life in him and to communicate that life to others, to society and to the world?

First and foremost, Christ makes his person, his life and his teaching known to us through the word of God. At the beginning of this new phase that the missionary Church of Latin America and the Caribbean is preparing to enter, starting with this Fifth General Conference in Aparecida, an indispensable pre-condition is profound knowledge of the word of God.

To achieve this, we must train people to read and meditate on the word of God: this must become their staple diet, so that, through their own experience, the faithful will see that the words of Jesus are spirit and life (cf. John 6:63). Otherwise, how could they proclaim a message whose content and spirit they do not know thoroughly? We must build our missionary commitment and the whole of our lives on the rock of the word of God. For this reason, I encourage the Bishops to strive to make it known.

An important way of introducing the People of God to the mystery of Christ is through catechesis. Here, the message of Christ is transmitted in a simple and substantial form. It is therefore necessary to intensify the catechesis and the faith formation not only of children but also of young people and adults.

Mature reflection on faith is a light for the path of life and a source of strength for witnessing to Christ. Most valuable tools with which to achieve this are the Catechism of the Catholic Church and its abridged version, the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In this area, we must not limit ourselves solely to homilies, lectures, Bible courses or theology courses, but we must have recourse also to the communications media: press, radio and television, websites, forums and many other methods for effectively communicating the message of Christ to a large number of people.

In this effort to come to know the message of Christ and to make it a guide for our own lives, we must remember that evangelization has always developed alongside the promotion of the human person and authentic Christian liberation. "Love of God and love of neighbour have become one; in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God" Encyclical Letter Deus Caritas Est, 15).

For the same reason, there will also need to be social catechesis and a sufficient formation in the social teaching of the Church, for which a very useful tool is the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. The Christian life is not expressed solely in personal virtues, but also in social and political virtues.

The disciple, founded in this way upon the rock of God’s word, feels driven to bring the Good News of salvation to his brothers and sisters. Discipleship and mission are like the two sides of a single coin: when the disciple is in love with Christ, he cannot stop proclaiming to the world that only in him do we find salvation (cf. Acts 4:12). In effect, the disciple knows that without Christ there is no light, no hope, no love, no future.

4. "So that in him they may have life"

The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have the right to a full life, proper to the children of God, under conditions that are more human: free from the threat of hunger and from every form of violence.

For these peoples, their Bishops must promote a culture of life which can permit, in the words of my predecessor Paul VI, "the passage from misery towards the possession of necessities … the acquisition of culture … cooperation for the common good … the acknowledgement by man of supreme values, and of God, their source and their finality" (Populorum Progressio, 21).

In this context I am pleased to recall the Encyclical Populorum Progressio, the fortieth anniversary of which we celebrate this year. This Papal document emphasizes that authentic development must be integral, that is, directed to the promotion of the whole person and of all people (cf. No. 14), and it invites all to overcome grave social inequalities and the enormous differences in access to goods.

These peoples are yearning, above all, for the fullness of life that Christ brought us: "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). With this divine life, human existence is likewise developed to the full, in its personal, family, social and cultural dimensions.

In order to form the disciple and sustain the missionary in his great task, the Church offers him, in addition to the bread of the word, the bread of the Eucharist. In this regard, we find inspiration and illumination in the passage from the Gospel about the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

When they sit at table and receive from Jesus Christ the bread that has been blessed and broken, their eyes are opened and they discover the face of the Risen Lord, they feel in their hearts that everything he said and did was the truth, and that the redemption of the world has already begun to unfold.

Every Sunday and every Eucharist is a personal encounter with Christ. Listening to God’s word, our hearts burn because it is he who is explaining and proclaiming it. When we break the bread at the Eucharist, it is he whom we receive personally. The Eucharist is indispensable nourishment for the life of the disciple and missionary of Christ.

Sunday Mass, Centre of Christian life

Hence the need to give priority in pastoral programmes to appreciation of the importance of Sunday Mass. We must motivate Christians to take an active part in it, and if possible, to bring their families, which is even better.

The participation of parents with their children at Sunday Mass is an effective way of teaching the faith and it is a close bond that maintains their unity with one another. Sunday, throughout the Church’s life, has been the privileged moment of the community’s encounter with the risen Lord.

Christians should be aware that they are not following a character from past history, but the living Christ, present in the today and the now of their lives. He is the living one who walks alongside us, revealing to us the meaning of events, of suffering and death, of rejoicing and feasting, entering our homes and remaining there, feeding us with the bread that gives life. For this reason Sunday Mass must be the centre of Christian life.

The encounter with Christ in the Eucharist calls forth a commitment to evangelization and an impulse towards solidarity; it awakens in the Christian a strong desire to proclaim the Gospel and to bear witness to it in the world so as to build a more just and humane society.

From the Eucharist, in the course of the centuries, an immense wealth of charity has sprung forth, of sharing in the difficulties of others, of love and of justice. Only from the Eucharist will the civilization of love spring forth which will transform Latin America and the Caribbean, making them not only the Continent of Hope, but also the Continent of Love!

Social and Political problems

Having arrived at this point, we can ask ourselves a question: how can the Church contribute to the solution of urgent social and political problems, and respond to the great challenge of poverty and destitution?

The problems of Latin America and the Caribbean, like those of today’s world, are multifaceted and complex, and they cannot be dealt with through generic programmes. Undoubtedly, the fundamental question about the way that the Church, illuminated by faith in Christ, should react to these challenges, is one that concerns us all.

In this context, we inevitably speak of the problem of structures, especially those which create injustice. In truth, just structures are a condition without which a just order in society is not possible.

But how do they arise? How do they function? Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves; they declared that not only would they have no need of any prior individual morality, but that they would promote a communal morality. And this ideological promise has been proved false. The facts have clearly demonstrated it.

The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit.

And we can also see the same thing happening in the West, where the distance between rich and poor is growing constantly, and giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.

Just structures are, as I have said, an indispensable condition for a just society, but they neither arise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values, and on the need to live these values with the necessary sacrifices, even if this goes against personal interest.

Where God is absent - God with the human face of Jesus Christ - these values fail to show themselves with their full force, nor does a consensus arise concerning them.

I do not mean that non-believers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values, even when they are in conflict with private interests.

On the other hand, just structures must be sought and elaborated in the light of fundamental values, with the full engagement of political, economic and social reasoning. They are a question of recta ratio and they do not arise from ideologies nor from their premises.

Certainly there exists a great wealth of political experience and expertise on social and economic problems that can highlight the fundamental elements of a just state and the paths that must be avoided.

But in different cultural and political situations, amid constant developments in technology and changes in the historical reality of the world, adequate answers must be sought in a rational manner, and a consensus must be created - with the necessary commitments - on the structures that must be established.

This political task is not the immediate competence of the Church. Respect for a healthy secularity - including the pluralism of political opinions - is essential in the authentic Christian tradition. If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions.

The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere.

To form consciences, to be the advocate of justice and truth, to educate in individual and political virtues: that is the fundamental vocation of the Church in this area. And lay Catholics must be aware of their responsibilities in public life; they must be present in the formation of the necessary consensus and in opposition to injustice.

Just structures will never be complete in a definitive way. As history continues to evolve, they must be constantly renewed and updated; they must always be imbued with a political and humane ethos - and we have to work hard to ensure its presence and effectiveness.

In other words, the presence of God, friendship with the incarnate Son of God, the light of his word: these are always fundamental conditions for the presence and efficacy of justice and love in our societies.

This being a Continent of baptized Christians, it is time to overcome the notable absence - in the political sphere, in the world of the media and in the universities - of the voices and initiatives of Catholic leaders with strong personalities and generous dedication, who are coherent in their ethical and religious convictions.

The ecclesial movements have plenty of room here to remind the laity of their responsibility and their mission to bring the light of the Gospel into public life, into culture, economics and politics.

5. Other priority areas

In order to bring about this renewal of the Church that has been entrusted to your care in these lands, let me draw your attention to some areas that I consider priorities for this new phase.

The family

The family, the "patrimony of humanity", constitutes one of the most important treasures of Latin American countries. The family was and is the school of faith, the training-ground for human and civil values, the hearth in which human life is born and is generously and responsibly welcomed.

Undoubtedly, it is currently suffering a degree of adversity caused by secularism and by ethical relativism, by movements of population internally and externally, by poverty, by social instability and by civil legislation opposed to marriage which, by supporting contraception and abortion, is threatening the future of peoples.

In some families in Latin America there still unfortunately persists a chauvinist mentality that ignores the "newness" of Christianity, in which the equal dignity and responsibility of women relative to men is acknowledged and affirmed.

The family is irreplaceable for the personal serenity it provides and for the upbringing of children. Mothers who wish to dedicate themselves fully to bringing up their children and to the service of their family must enjoy conditions that make this possible, and for this they have the right to count on the support of the State. In effect, the role of the mother is fundamental for the future of society.

The father, for his part, has the duty to be a true father, fulfilling his indispensable responsibility and cooperating in bringing up the children. The children, for their integral growth, have a right to be able to count on their father and mother, who take care of them and accompany them on their way towards the fullness of life.

Consequently there has to be intense and vigorous pastoral care of families. Moreover, it is indispensable to promote authentic family policies corresponding to the rights of the family as an essential subject in society. The family constitutes part of the good of peoples and of the whole of humanity.

Priests

The first promoters of discipleship and mission are those who have been called "to be with Jesus and to be sent out to preach" (cf. Mark 3:14), that is, the priests. They must receive preferential attention and paternal care from their Bishops, because they are the primary instigators of authentic renewal of Christian life among the People of God.

I should like to offer them a word of paternal affection, hoping that "the Lord will be their portion and cup" (cf. Psalm 16:5). If the priest has God as the foundation and centre of his life, he will experience the joy and the fruitfulness of his vocation.

The priest must be above all a "man of God" (1 Timothy 6:11) who knows God directly, who has a profound personal friendship with Jesus, who shares with others the same sentiments that Christ has (cf. Philippians 2:5).

Only in this way will the priest be capable of leading men to God, incarnate in Jesus Christ, and of being the representative of his love.

In order to accomplish his lofty task, the priest must have a solid spiritual formation, and the whole of his life must be imbued with faith, hope and charity. Like Jesus, he must be one who seeks, through prayer, the face and the will of God, and he must be attentive to his cultural and intellectual preparation.

Dear priests of this Continent, and those of you who have come here to work as missionaries, the Pope accompanies you in your pastoral work and wants you to be full of joy and hope; above all he prays for you.

Religious men and women and consecrated persons

I now want to address the religious men and women and consecrated members of the lay faithful. Latin American and Caribbean society needs your witness: in a world that so often gives priority to seeking well-being, wealth and pleasure as the goal of life, exalting freedom to the point where it takes the place of the truth of man created by God, you are witnesses that there is another meaningful way to live.

Remind your brothers and sisters that the Kingdom of God has already arrived; that justice and truth are possible if we open ourselves to the loving presence of God our Father, of Christ our brother and Lord, and of the Holy Spirit, our Comforter.

With generosity and with heroism, you must continue working to ensure that society is ruled by love, justice, goodness, service and solidarity in conformity with the charism of your founders.

With profound joy, embrace your consecration, which is an instrument of sanctification for you and of redemption for your brothers and sisters.

The Church in Latin America thanks you for the great work that you have accomplished over the centuries for the Gospel of Christ in favour of your brothers and sisters, especially the poorest and most deprived.

I invite you always to work together with the Bishops and to work in unity with them, since they are the ones responsible for pastoral action. I exhort you also to sincere obedience towards the authority of the Church. Set yourselves no other goal than holiness, as you have learned from your founders.

The lay faithful

At this time when the Church of this Continent is committing herself whole-heartedly to her missionary vocation, I remind the lay faithful that they too are the Church, the assembly called together by Christ so as to bring his witness to the whole world.

All baptized men and women must become aware that they have been configured to Christ, the Priest, Prophet and Shepherd, by means of the common priesthood of the People of God. They must consider themselves jointly responsible for building society according to the criteria of the Gospel, with enthusiasm and boldness, in communion with their Pastors.

There are many of you here who belong to ecclesial movements, in which we can see signs of the varied presence and sanctifying action of the Holy Spirit in the Church and in today’s society. You are called to bring to the world the testimony of Jesus Christ, and to be a leaven of God’s love among others.

Young people and pastoral care of vocations

In Latin America the majority of the population is made up of young people. In this regard, we must remind them that their vocation is to be Christ’s friends, his disciples. Young people are not afraid of sacrifice, but of a meaningless life. They are sensitive to Christ’s call inviting them to follow him.

They can respond to that call as priests, as consecrated men and women, or as fathers and mothers of families, totally dedicated to serving their brothers and sisters with all their time and capacity for dedication: with their whole lives.

Young people must treat life as a continual discovery, never allowing themselves to be ensnared by current fashions or mentalities, but proceeding with a profound curiosity over the meaning of life and the mystery of God, the Creator and Father, and his Son, our Redeemer, within the human family.

They must also commit themselves to a constant renewal of the world in the light of the Gospel. More still, they must oppose the facile illusions of instant happiness and the deceptive paradise offered by drugs, pleasure, and alcohol, and they must oppose every form of violence.

6. "Stay with us"

The deliberations of this Fifth General Conference lead us to make the plea of the disciples on the road to Emmaus our own: "Stay with us, for it is towards evening, and the day is now far spent" (Luke 24:29).

Stay with us, Lord, keep us company, even though we have not always recognized you. Stay with us, because all around us the shadows are deepening, and you are the Light; discouragement is eating its way into our hearts: make them burn with the certainty of Easter.

We are tired of the journey, but you comfort us in the breaking of bread, so that we are able to proclaim to our brothers and sisters that you have truly risen and have entrusted us with the mission of being witnesses of your resurrection.

Stay with us, Lord, when mists of doubt, weariness or difficulty rise up around our Catholic faith; you are Truth itself, you are the one who reveals the Father to us: enlighten our minds with your word, and help us to experience the beauty of believing in you.

Remain in our families, enlighten them in their doubts, sustain them in their difficulties, console them in their sufferings and in their daily labours, when around them shadows build up which threaten their unity and their natural identity.

You are Life itself: remain in our homes, so that they may continue to be nests where human life is generously born, where life is welcomed, loved and respected from conception to natural death.

Remain, Lord, with those in our societies who are most vulnerable; remain with the poor and the lowly, with indigenous peoples and Afro-Americans, who have not always found space and support to express the richness of their culture and the wisdom of their identity.

Remain, Lord, with our children and with our young people, who are the hope and the treasure of our Continent, protect them from so many snares that attack their innocence and their legitimate hopes. O Good Shepherd, remain with our elderly and with our sick. Strengthen them all in faith, so that they may be your disciples and missionaries!

Conclusion

As I conclude my stay among you, I wish to invoke the protection of the Mother of God and Mother of the Church on you and on the whole of Latin America and the Caribbean.

I beseech Our Lady in particular, under the title of Guadalupe, Patroness of America, and under the title of Aparecida, Patroness of Brazil, to accompany you in your exciting and demanding pastoral task.

To her I entrust the People of God at this stage of the third Christian millennium. I also ask her to guide the deliberations and reflections of this General Conference and I ask her to bless with copious gifts the beloved peoples of this Continent.

[Original text: Plurilingual]
© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2007 5.46]

THE POPE HAS LEFT BRAZIL...
AND WILL REST THIS WEEK IN CG


Vatican Radio's Italian service had this report:



Pope Benedict XVI's sixth apostolic voyage to a foreign country concluded tonight. On leaving Brazilian soil, after having opened the Fifth General Conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Aparecida, the Pope referred to his visit as "intense and unforgettable hours."

The Pope was flown by helicopter from Aparecida to Sao Paulo's Guarulhos International Airport, where he was seen off by Vice President Jose Alencar Gomez.

At the brief departure ceremony, the Pope invoked a blessing on all the civilian and religious officials of Brazil, that they might "promote decisive initiatives for the common good of the great Latin American family."

He also greeted all the peoples of Latin America to whom he entruested the expected fruits of these days "full of joy and hope - gaudium et spes! - for the Christian family and its mission in society."

The Pope's flight left Sao Paulo around 8:15 p.m. Brazil time and will be arriving in Rome Monday afternoon at 12:45 p.m.



After 12 hours -
A SAFE RETURN TO ROME, AN UNLIKELY WELCOME
AND ON TO CASTEL GANDOLFO FOR A FEW DAYS REST





From various Italian news agency and newspaper reports:

The Alitalia papal flight from Sao Paulo touched down at 12:25 p.m. Monday, May 14, at Rome's Ciampino airport, and Pope Benedict XVI debarked as scheduled at 12:45 p.m.

Waiting to welcome him in behalf of the Italian government was Family Minister Rosy Bindi, co-author of the DICO draft law opposed by the Catholic Church, just two days after a mammoth Family Day rally in Rome to uphold conventional marriage and the traditional family against legislation like DICO, which would grant quasi-marital rights to de-facto unions (both hetero- and homosexual).

Bindi told newsmen later that she kissed the Pope's ring three times and that "I love the Holy Father."

She recounted that he broke the ice by saying, "I hear you are having a meeting on the family soon."

To which she answered, "Yes, it's the first time any Italian government will spell out initiatives regarding national policy on the family."

The Pope asked, "When is this taking place?"

She informed him, "In Florence on May 24-26."

His parting words to her were, "Then good luck with the work. And best wishes" before getting into the car to go to Castel Gandolfo, where he is spending the rest of the week.

He will return to the Vatican on Frinday afternoon. He will not be holding his regular Wednesday audience this week.

Bindi, who has been president of Italy's national Catholic Action, said her three minutes with the pope were 'very emotional' for her, and that Prime Minister Romano Prodi had given her the assignment 'one week earlier."

She said she wore the suit she had on when she was sworn in several months ago as Italy's first Family Minister. She also said she was aware that she was one of the objects of 'attention' at the Family Day rally, where some posters read "PIU BIMBI, MENO BINDI' (More babies, less Bindi).

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/05/2007 11.48]

During a pastoral visit by the Pope - even short ones like those to Pavia and Vigevano recently, one gets tied up so much with the mechanics of following the coverage on several tracks and tyring to present it as comprehensively as one can, that one really has no time to formulate reflections on what is happening.

For now, I would just like to say what a great week this has been - with the Pope's epochal visit to Brazil, the resounding success of Italians turning out Saturday in support of the family, and the 90th anniversary of the Marian apparitions in Fatima.

Very auspicious signs for the Church and for the Pope, whose addresses in Brazil have been remarkable for the courage, clarity and force with which he said things that need to be said.

Regardless of what the media has been reporting, there is a considerable core of Catholics in Brazil who live their faith consistently enough to say NO to abortion (even polls reported in the media say that majority of Brazilian Catholics do not support legalizing abortion, which is very surprising).

And if the sects have managed to attract 20 million Catholics, or whatever the number is claimed to be in the past few years, there are still at least 125 million Brazilian Catholics around whom the Church can rebuild and reinforce the faith. That's still an impressive figure that all the Protestants together in Brazil do not yet come anywhere close.

The MSM all wondered how Pope Benedict XVI would 'handle' Brazil and how he would fare with the Brazilians. They still have to learn, after two years, that Benedict XVI's best asset is that he is always himself and does not try to be anyone else, nor sound like anyone else - because why should he, after all? Is anyone better at being Pope than he is?

I'm sure he does not think of it the way we do, but it's as simple as that. I think it was John Allen who recently made the comment, "This Pope knows how to Pope." Not so much that he knows 'how to Pope', because that he does, but more important is, as he puts it - that he allows himself to be a vessel for God's will, for the Holy Spirit, if you will. So how can he go wrong?

And how can we not help being so proud as Catholics to have Benedict XVI symbolize our Church to the world? The Papal attribute as the Vicar of Christ on earth has never been so clearly embodied in our lifetime, by him as by John Paul II. [I mean this without disrespect nor discrimination for the other 20th-century Popes, only because the global influence of a Pope never truly became appreciable until the advent of satellite communications and today the Internet.]

BENEDICTUS QUI VENIT IN NOMINE DOMINI! DEO GRATIAS!

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 16/05/2007 0.19]

Surprisingly, not one of the Anglophone news agency reports ever mentioned during the Pope's visit what the Brazilian media have reported about popular reaction to the Pope, whether in general or with specific references [by which I don't mean the isolated comments they quote from which are generally unfavorable or indifferent.

I have not had a chance to review any the Brazilian papers - at least Sao Paulo's leading daily - but in a quick review of the major German newspapers, I find that Die Welt - Paul Badde has an excellent article that must be translated!, BILD, Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Sueddeutsche Zeitung all report that Brazilian newspapers reported the Pope had won hearts and came as an unexpectedly pleasant surprise to most Brazilians who had only heard him described in negative terms.

Deutsche Press Agentur (dpa) has a surprisingly negative - and stupid - assessment that presumes to judge the effect of the Pope's visit on the major problems facing the Church in Latin America after five days!

But it also reported the following:

Niceness of Pope Benedict surprises Lula,
report says


Rio de Janeiro, May 11 (dpa) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told his ministers that he was surprised by the 'niceness' of Pope Benedict XVI during their private meeting, the daily Folha de Sao Paulo reported Friday.

The newspaper said Lula told his advisors that the pontiff is nicer than he looked on television. Both men met in private for about half-a-hour on Thursday.

According to the report, Lula said Benedict initially struck him as 'very German' in terms of formality, but that he was positively surprised when he appeared more relaxed and nicer as the meeting progressed.

The pope is currently on a five-day pastoral visit to Brazil which is his first trip to the Americas as pontiff. On Friday, he was set to canonize the first Brazilian-born saint in an open-air mass before an estimated 1 million people in Sao Paulo.

On the flight to the world's largest Catholic country, Benedict stirred up controversy about abortion. The leftist Lula has said he is personally against abortion, but wants to liberalize the country's legislation on the matter.

Here's their negative report. Just consider that absurd title!

Pope ends trip to Brazil
with few results in sight
By Peer Meinert and Emilio Rappold

Aparecida do Norte, Brazil, May 13 (dpa) - Pope Benedict XVI was set to end Sunday a crucial and intense five-day visit to Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic country.

Usually 80-year-olds avoid such strain. Travelling from Rome to Brazil, appearing in public a score of times, many speeches, helicopter rides ... The pope did not spare himself during this visit.

One Italian commentator termed the trip 'Benedict's first crusade.' 'The attempt to reconquer a continent,' said another.

There was indeed a lot at stake - no less than pulling the Catholic Church in Latin America (where nearly half of its 1.1 billion followers are thought to live) out of its current crisis.

Did the pope's effort pay off?

On Sunday morning, the sanctuary of Aparecida, the largest pilgrimage destination in Latin America, in the state of Sao Paulo, was set to host a crowded open-air mass with which Benedict was to close his journey in triumph.

However, only about half of the 500,000 people originally expected showed up on the square before the modern basilica - the second- largest building of its kind, after Saint Peter's in the Vatican.

'A disappointment,' according to one member of the pope's entourage.

Earlier in the visit, the rather subdued enthusiasm around the pontiff in Sao Paulo had been blamed on the bad weather. But a radiant sun shone on Aparecida.

The message the pope has repeated insistently in his Brazilian visit helps explain the situation. Benedict has demanded a renewed 'evangelization' of Latin America. He invited Catholics 'to become profoundly missionary' in order to bring back into the fold of the 'Mother Church' the millions of lost faithful.

Time and again the pontiff asked for more effort and enthusiasm among his followers, but that is precisely what his legendary predecessor John Paul II asked for three decades ago - without any notable success to speak of.

The drastic exodus of Latin Americans from the Church to join pentecostal religions (which the Vatican considers sects) has been going on for decades, and it hovered like an angry spirit over Benedict's visit to Brazil.

The pontiff opened on Sunday the fifth General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean - also attended by bishops from North America and the Iberian Peninsula. The gathering has as its main objective the discussion of strategies to halt this loss of faithful. But even the pope showed he has no remedy to overcome the crisis.

Within Brazil, reactions to the papal visit were mixed. The pontiff's harsh words on abortion and chastity caused particular displeasure in a country that considers itself socially liberal.

'This pope delivered all his messages with a harsh tone of reproach,' noted the daily Folha de Sao Paulo, the most important in Brazil's financial metropolis.

'He said harsh words with a smile on his face,' another commentator noted.

These interpretations do not sound like a sign of enthusiasm.

Many think that the exodus from the 'Mother Church' has already been happening for too long for the trend to be easily reversed.

Even among those who do not turn away from the Church, things are not quite right. A recent study showed that only 9 per cent of Brazilian Catholics claimed that the Church continues to have real influence over their daily lives.

Some 96 per cent of the country's young Catholics admitted that they are in favour of the use of condoms. Millions of Latin American Catholic women take the pill. The demands of chastity formulated by the pope in Brazil sound like messages from another world.

The pope knows that - as has already happened in Europe - millions of people in Latin America are threatening to abandon the Church. And it remains questionable whether his trip will manage to halt that.

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

Of course, many who are hostile to Benedict have seized on the crowd numbers in Brazil as ammunition, and their gloating is almost palpable. I just saw Marco Politi's report for La Repubblica, which he ends by saying "During the whole trip, the people's particiaption was most disappointing, They expected up to 1 million [that's grossly wrong, of course - the organizers said 500,000 max] in Aparecida, and probably only 200,000 showed up."

Politi et al are only too happy to report 'disappointing' figures, but do they ever report the crowds at St. Peter's? Noooo! because that would be giving Ratzinger credit!!! Strangely, no one has mentioned the number that turned up in Aparecida for John Paul II in 1980. I have to check the Weigel bio if he gives any figure for that.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/05/2007 17.30]

Latin American, Caribbean bishops tackle agenda outlined by pope

By Barbara J. Fraser
Catholic News Service

APARECIDA, Brazil (CNS) -- With their agenda broadly outlined by Pope Benedict XVI, the bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean began the conference that will lead to pastoral guidelines for the region for the next 10-15 years.

Several bishops who spoke with journalists said the pope raised many of the issues likely to be addressed during the conference, including deeper formation in the faith and church social doctrine, poverty, ministry among indigenous peoples and family life.

Archbishop Pedro Barreto Jimeno of Huancayo, Peru, called the pope's May 13 speech to the bishops "inspiring" and "encouraging." Archbishop Baltazar Porras Cardozo of Merida, Venezuela, told journalists that the pope did not "put us in a straitjacket" but "came to present a challenge to the church."

The pope's address officially opened the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, which runs through May 31.

On May 14, after Mass in the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady Aparecida, the 266 bishops and observers attending the meeting spent the morning in a retreat. The afternoon session included speeches by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, and Archbishop Geraldo Lyrio Rocha of Mariana, president of the Brazilian bishops' conference.

Many of the points raised by the pope have to do with values that "go beyond the bounds of the church and touch society as a whole," said Bishop Antonio Queiroz of Catanduva, Brazil.

Pope Benedict told the bishops that the church should not take an active role in partisan politics, but should focus on forming laypeople to apply Christian values in social and political life.

Conferences of bishops in various Latin American countries regularly issue statements on political and economic issues ranging from land rights to corporate responsibility to policies for combating poverty. Several bishops said the pope's words did not mean that the church should not take a stand on political issues.

"We do participate in politics," said Bishop Hector Gutierrez Pabon of Engativa, Colombia. "When we are committed to the common good, we are involved in politics, but not partisan politics. It is politics that seeks the common good" through the Gospel and the church's social doctrine.

"The pope affirmed that the church must defend justice and the poor. It therefore must be independent of those who hold political and economic power," Archbishop Barreto told Catholic News Service. The church must avoid "any collaboration (with those powers) or complicity through silence," he said.

A reference by the pope to pre-Columbus religions raised questions among some observers. While speaking positively of the synthesis between indigenous traditions and Christianity that led to the popular religious devotions found throughout Latin America, the pontiff warned against "the utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbus religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal church."

Asked whether that represented a step back from the openness to indigenous traditions that has marked other gatherings of the region's church leaders, Archbishop Porras said, "It is not a retreat," but a recognition that "the coinciding of values in (Christianity's) encounter and dialogue with ancestral religions meant that these peoples assumed it in a rich way that is particularly expressed in Latin American popular religious practice."

That practice, however, does not necessarily translate into active parish life in Latin America.

While millions of Latin Americans make pilgrimages to well-known shrines, such as Aparecida, Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico and the Lord of the Miracles in Peru, as well as countless local places of devotion, "they do not participate in the weekly Eucharist" in their parishes, said Cardinal Javier Errazuriz Ossa of Santiago, Chile, president of the Latin American bishops' council, known by its Spanish acronym as CELAM.

The myriad devotions do not mean "that these people have developed a full sense of the deep Christian truth. They live out fundamental aspects of our faith, but the enormous richness of the Christian faith still has not borne fruit."

How to enhance these Catholics' faith formation and reach others who consider themselves Catholic but do not participate in church life is likely to be high on the bishops' agenda in the coming weeks.

The pope's reference to Latin American male chauvinism may also spark conversation among the bishops.

"The pope recognized that the church owes a certain debt to women," Bishop Queiroz said, although he added that women's ordination is "a closed issue." The bishop called it a "sin of evangelization" that "women have worked more than men for the church, but it has been difficult to acknowledge the place that women truly merit."

While the agenda for the bishops' meeting was loosely set by the pope and by several thousand pages of suggestions that emerged from discussions in dioceses throughout the region, as well as among Hispanics in 50 dioceses in the United States, the specific issues to be discussed and the work methodology were to be determined in the first few days of the meeting in Aparecida.

One issue that the bishops are likely to raise, although it did not figure prominently in the pope's May 13 speech, is "the destruction of the environment," Archbishop Barreto said.

Another is education. At the youth rally on the second day of the pope's visit, a young woman called for the church to do more to help poor students and those who could not attend school because they lack funds or have to work to help support their families.

Archbishop Barreto said the quality of education in the region deserves attention from church leaders.

"Governments are investing less and less in education and the quality is decreasing," he said. "A country that has inadequate education cannot develop harmoniously."

Interview: A Rising Latin American Cardinal

By Jeff Israely/APARECIDA, Brazil
TIME Magazine
Monday, May. 14, 2007

Some say Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga has the stuff to one day become Pope. For now, he is among the most influential Catholic leaders fighting for social justice. Rodriguez spoke with TIME?s Jeff Israely about lobbying for hunger, pro-choice politicians and the prospects of a Third World Pope, during Pope Benedict XVI?s visit to Aparecida, Brazil to inaugurate the the Fifth conference of Latin American bishops that runs through May 31.

Q. What is the single biggest priority for the Latin American Church?

A. It is necessary to review our pastoral models. They?ve been exhausted. We need more creative ways to confront the challenges of the 21st century. We must figure out how to take the gospel and the battle for social justice to the politicians of Latin America and the world.

Q. What?s your view of Latin America?s current political leaders: Lula in Brazil, Chavez in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, and others?

A. People say Latin America is turning to the left. I say that it is simply seeking social justice. I look at my own country, and so many want to go to the United States because there is no work in Honduras, because there is no development.

Q. But isn?t there a risk in religious leaders getting involved in politics?

A. I am calling for a new evangelization of politicians and world economic leaders. Yes, keeping church separate from politics is a good thing, but that does not mean being enemies. The citizens of the church are also citizens of the state. I?m not choosing one party or other, but offering the richness of the gospel.

Q. Pope Benedict has focused on the inner aspect of charity work. Is this a departure from the Church?s social doctrine of trying?

A. The Pope is touching an important point: We could be giving our help, but what happens if the person we are helping really doesn?t change? If he continues to beg? We must not suppose they are converted. We want to help people to develop as humans and working humans.

Q. Do you agree with the Pope?s statement that pro-choice Catholic politicians merit excommunication.

A. It is canon law that everyone who works for abortion is excommunicated. It?s not something the Pope invented. If you favor abortion, you are outside the communion of the Church. And it was necessary to say that. There are people in Mexico saying I am Catholic and I support abortion rights. This is a contradiction in its very essence. As a teacher of the Church, the Pope has a responsibility of teaching when something happening is wrong.

Q. Do you agree with bishops who deny giving Holy Communion to the these politicians?

A. This is a different point. For who am I to deny Holy Communion to a person? I cannot. It?s in the tradition of moral theology that even if I know a person is living in grave sin, I cannot take a public action against him. It would be giving scandal to the person. Yes, he should not seek (communion), but I cannot deny it from him.

Q. What?s your overall assessment of Benedict?s trip to Brazil?

A. I was impressed by the Pope. He seems to be on the same wave as the people. Of course he?s not John Paul, he has a different personality. And though personality has a big influence, so too does the Holy Spirit. I hope he will come back soon to Latin America

Q. Will we see a Latin American Pope some day?

A. It would be a great blessing. It?s not a question of nationality, (but) is simply because of the situation in the world, and what it would mean to have a Pope from the Third World. The Holy Spirit saw that the Church in Europe is in great difficulty and so it gave us a Pope who knows these problems well, and is a great intellectual who can dialogue at the highest level with anyone. I know the Spirit will shift in the direction of other countries and continents in the future.?

[TIME Magazine's Jeff Israely, who obviously wishes Benedict were some kind of swashbuckling social reformer, continues his trashing of the pope in the article below. He shows his bias toward Cardinal Maradiaga in the article above.]


No Love Affair for the Pope in Brazil

By Jeff Israely/APARECIDA, Brazil
TIME Magazine
Monday, May. 14, 2007

Pope Benedict XVI was always fighting an uphill battle when it came to winning the hearts and minds of the world's most Catholic continent. Two years ago, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger walked out of the conclave as the new Roman Pontiff, the news was greeted in Brazil with a tinge of disappointment. Cardinal Claudio Hummes, then the Archbishop of Sao Paulo, was considered a frontrunner going into the conclave, and many had been saying that it was "Latin America's turn" to have the papacy, after centuries of Italians and the non-Italian European Pope John Paul II.

So perhaps it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the meeting of an 80-year-old professorial pontiff and the often exuberant Brazilian flock was not an around-the-clock love affair. For starters, there wasn't the massive turnout for the Pope that some were expecting: far more faithful, for example, had lined the popemobile routes during Benedict's visit to Poland last May, and the canonization mass in the 11-million-strong city of Sao Paulo fell well short of Vatican hopes for one million participants. The national press, meanwhile, focused on ongoing polemics linked to the issue of abortion, especially after Benedict issued a strong warning (as in ex-communication) to pro-choice politicians on his Rome-Sao Paulo flight.

Ultimately what may have been missing was some kind of bold gesture to demonstrate the Pope's personal connection with the problems of poverty and social unrest that continue to plague much of Latin America. On John Paul's first visit to Brazil in 1980 he spontaneously donated his golden papal ring to a small parish on a walking visit to a shantytown "favela" in Rio de Janeiro. Benedict's visit to the Comunita della Fazenda da Esperanca on Saturday, where recovering addicts told dramatic stories of their troubles, was no doubt heartfelt. But compared with his predecessor's tendency to mix it up with the flock, this came off as a more orchestrated encounter in the protected and bucolic confines of a successful Catholic-run retreat.

Not to say that the German Pope didn't generate and receive a fair share of warmth in a series of encounters and ceremonies in Sao Paulo and the Marian shrine town of Aparecida. He met with Brazilian priests and bishops; led a stadium rally of 30,000 young people; presided over an open-air canonization mass of the first-ever Brazilian-born saint; prayed to the country's patron saint; and inaugurated the Fifth conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops that began on Sunday in Aparecida. Reading fluently, and occasionally forcefully, in Portuguese, Benedict did his best to get across his message of commitment to the passions and traditions of the faith, and his criticisms of both Marxism and capitalism. In his concluding address Sunday evening to Latin American cardinals, the Pope said the failures of the past century can be blamed on a blind reliance on economic models. "A society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values, even when they are in conflict with private interests," he said.

Emerson Rossi, 50, who walked 400 kilometers from his hometown of Jundiai to attend Sunday's closing mass in Aparecida, as part of his church group Caminho da Fe (Walk of Faith), summed up Benedict's challenge of being in the shadow of his predecessor. "John Paul was a phenomenon. [Benedict] is normal," he said. "John Paul was a charismatic, he was about emotions. We Brazilians are about emotions." The concluding mass drew just 150,000 worshipers, far short of the hundreds of thousand of pilgrims who arrive at the same shrine for the annual mass to commemorate the Virgin Mary.

With the lukewarm reception it generated, the Pope's visit to Brazil only further underlined the continent's feeling that its time has come to lead the Vatican. (Although there's no indication another conclave is near, as Benedict proved to be in notably strong physical shape on his rigorous schedule of events in Brazil.) Among Latin America's "papabili" — those thought to have the requisites to be Pope — are some figures talked about right after John Paul died, and some new names. Benedict has brought Hummes from Sao Paulo to Rome to head the Vatican's office of clergy, making the Brazilian an ever stronger papal candidate. The Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is believed to have received more votes in the 2005 conclave than anyone but Ratzinger, is a favorite of traditionalists. Cardinal Francisco Javier Err?zuriz Ossa of Santiago, Chile, has emerged as a forceful figure on the continent.

One Latin American who has been talked about as papal material even before he became Cardinal in 2001 is Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras. In an interview Saturday with TIME at the convent in Aparecida where he's staying during the bishops conference, Cardinal Rodriguez said a future Pope from Latin America "would be a great blessing" for the Church.

"It's not a question of nationality," he said. "It's simply because of the situation in the world, and what it would mean to have a Pope from the Third World." Enthusiastic about Benedict's trip to Latin America, Rodriguez says the German's election was a sign that "the holy spirit saw that the Church in Europe is in great difficulty and so it gave us a Pope who knows these problems well. He is a great intellectual who can dialogue at the highest level with anyone," he said. "I know the spirit will shift in the direction of other countries and continents in the future." For Emerson Rossi the future is a 57-year-old auxiliary bishop of Sao Paulo, Joaquim Justino Carreira, who may well be on his way to a Cardinal post. And if Benedict stays healthy for another decade or more, Rossi points out, Carreira would be the perfect age to become the next Pope.

[Yet another negative review listing all the groups the pope supposedly offended on his Brazil trip. I think they forgot to include drug dealers in the list but that could have been construed as a positive.]


Pope breeds controversy in Brazil tour
Mon May 14, 6:52 PM ET
AFP

Pope Benedict XVI's five-day trip to Brazil seems unlikely to stem a two-decade slide in Roman Catholic membership as different groups, including indigenous activists, criticized his visit.

"Many peoples adopted Christianity, but it was imposed by force," said Marcio Meira, president of the National Foundation of the Indigenous, a Brazilian government organization.

"The pope was very arrogant," said Gesinaldo Satere Mawe, director of an umbrella group of Amazonian native groups.

Benedict's statement during his first trip to Latin America as pope that "Christianity was not imposed by a foreign culture" drew a sharp reaction from the native leaders.

"Christ was the Savior (America's natives) silently yearned for," the pope said. Benedict also called the resurgence of pre-Columbian religions "a step backward," offending native peoples as far away as Mexico.

"His statements are ridiculous," said Roberto Olivares, president of Ojo de Agua, a group that promotes indigenous values in Oaxaca, Mexico.

"The Catholic religion was imposed despite our beliefs and our religion," said Mauricio Arias, a native people's leader in Bolivia.

The pope returned to Rome on Monday after a five-day tour of Brazil to galvanize the Roman Catholic church in Latin America.

However, Benedict's pronouncements in favor of sexual abstinence, birth control and abortion fell on deaf ears in Brazil, whose government hands out free condoms to schoolboys to curb AIDS and teenage pregnancy.

Benedict blasted "media that ridicule the sanctity of marriage and virginity before marriage."

However, Brazilian Secretary for Women's Rights Nilcea Freire called chastity "an absolutely individual decision" but an ineffective bulwark against AIDS.

"I have nothing for or against someone who wants to be chaste or someone who doesn't want to be, but we cannot base our program of prevention of sexually transmitted diseases and AIDS by advocating chastity," she told AFP.

Meanwhile, homosexuals and Catholic women favoring abortion rights protested in major Brazilian cities the Vatican's influence on government policies.

"Catholics have sex for pleasure, use condoms, support sexual diversity and don't condemn women for having abortions. When will the Church hierarchy change?" asks a poster brandished by women's groups outside cathedrals in Brazil's main cities.

The Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites and Transsexuals published an open letter Wednesday saying religious convictions "cannot influence government policies, much less be used to discriminate."

The conservative Benedict also took fire from Brazilian Health Minister Jose Gomes Temperao, over abortion.

"You can't impose the precepts and dogma of a particular religion on an entire society," Temperao said, adding: "Church and state have been separate in Brazil for centuries."

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva opposes abortion personally, but as president views it as a public health issue, because "otherwise it leads to the death of many girls in this country."

Opening a key conference of Latin American bishops Sunday, Benedict warned capitalist and Marxist governments in the region, and pointed to the continent's growing wealth gap.

Despite "notable progress toward democracy ... there are grounds for concern in the face of authoritarian forms of government and regimes wedded to certain ideologies that we thought had been superseded," he said.

Some analysts said it was a reference to Venezuela and its ally, communist Cuba.

However, Venezuela's Information Minister William Lara said the comment should not be interpreted as a jab at President Hugo Chavez.

"That would be playing into the hands of certain right-wing propagandists who want to use the pope's visit to Brazil as propaganda against the progressive forces of the continent," Lara told state-owned VTV television.

Representatives of pentecostal churches said they were stung by Benedict's charge that they are using "aggressive" tactics to recruit people to their faith.

On Friday, Benedict said people who are "insufficiently evangelized (are) most vulnerable to the aggressive proselytizing of (evangelical) sects -- a just cause for concern."

Robson Rodovalho, a deputy of the right-wing opposition Democratic Party, said the pope's characterization made common ground harder to find.

"This opinion makes dialogue difficult, especially when we must make a big effort to build a Christian faith in order to fight together for values and the defense of the family."

Benedict and Brazil

BY Father Owen Kearns
Publisher
National Catholic Register
May 20-26, 2007 Issue | Posted 5/15/07 at 8:00 AM

It’s has become almost a cliché of papal visits. At first, headlines report that the Pope will get a frosty reception because of widespread opposition to the faith. Then the Pope comes and attracts enormous cheering crowds. Seeing that the people clearly love the Pope and that he clearly loves them, media commentators start speaking of the “surprisingly enthusiastic reception” the Pope has received, when no one was surprised but them.

One reason this always happens is that the media applies a political formula to papal visits that just does not fit. Many reporters do not understand expressions of faith and are made uncomfortable by religious fervor. So they identify the issues they can cover, instead.

Issues loom large to reporters, and so Catholic groups that are identified with particular issues loom large, as well. But Catholic groups that target small political issues often turn out to be fringe organizations in the Church.

The media focuses on these groups and so focuses on what programs the Church is supporting or failing to support. And they miss the whole point.

In the case of Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Brazil, they will find a few programs. But mostly, they will be disappointed. The Holy Father’s message is that without God, programs are hollow, fruitless and ultimately disappointing.

And by God, he means, “not a God who is merely imagined or hypothetical, but God with a human face; he is God-with-us, the God who loves even to the Cross.”

This Christ-centered vision of the Pope is why the media will always miss the point — because they don’t see the central importance of Christ in history.

And it is also, incidentally, the very reason for the Register.

As Pope Benedict told the bishops of Brazil, “we must not limit ourselves solely to homilies, lectures, Bible courses or theology courses, but we must have recourse also to the communications media: press, radio and television, websites, forums and many other methods for effectively communicating the message of Christ to a large number of people.”

[Modificato da benefan 15/05/2007 20.30]

If the Pope were being rated by objective standards of what makes for effective communications, then no one would dispute that one of his best assets is the ability to stay on message and to be consistent with his message over the decades.

And so, every written and spoken message from him has always been guided by Saint Benedict's 'Nulla anteporre a Cristo!' - 'Never place anything ahead of Christ', the key Rule of Benedict.

Sandro Magister picks out the Pope's address to the bishops of Brazil on May 11 as the key document of the Pope's visit to Brazil, because he was explicit to the bishops about this point, as he always is when he speaks to his fellow priests.


From Brazil Resounds
a Word Sharper than a Sword:
A word that is a person - Jesus

The same person to whom Benedict XVI has dedicated the book of a lifetime.
For the pope, the future of the Church in Latin American and in the world is bound up with obedience to Him.
And he felt the need to remind the bishops of this.

by Sandro Magister


ROMA, May 15, 2007 – Among the twelve speeches, homilies, messages, and greetings pronounced by Benedict XVI during his four-day trip to Brazil, the one most keenly awaited was the inaugural address for the fifth conference of the bishops' conference of Latin American and the Caribbean, in Aparecida.

But the discourse that will be remembered in the future as the one most revealing of the pope's objectives was another. It was the one he delivered to the bishops of Brazil in the cathedral of Sao Paolo, at the end of Vespers on Friday, May 11.

It is the address reproduced further below. [I will not post Magister's somewhat abridged version, because we have the entire address on this thread.] ]

The pope begins it with words "sharper than a sword": the words of the New Testament on perfect obedience to the Father of Jesus, the savior of all precisely because he was obedient in everything, even to the cross.

The bishops, he asserts, are simply "bound" to this obedience: their mission is that of preaching the truth, baptizing, "saving souls one by one" in the name of Jesus.

"This, and nothing else, is the purpose of the Church," Benedict XVI emphasizes. Therefore, where the truth of the Christian faith is hidden, and where the sacraments are not celebrated, "the essential is also lacking for the solution of urgent social and political problems."

All of the instructions that the pope gave to the Brazilian bishops following the address descend from this foundation. Benedict XVI's clear intention is that of reestablishing Jesus, true God and true man, as the center of the Latin American Church: a Church that, in his judgment, has in recent decades strayed too far into political territory, under the influence of liberation theology.

For Benedict XVI, a strong effort of evangelization is the real response to the attacks against the family, to the crimes against life, to the abandoning of Catholicism in favor of the new "evangelical" and Pentecostal sects.

And priestly celibacy also weakens when "the structure of total consecration to God begins to lose its deepest meaning." And the poor must also be offered "the divine balm of the faith, without overlooking material bread."

Evangelizing means teaching Christian truth in its entirety, as summarized in the Catechism. It means celebrating the sacraments, especially Confession and the Eucharist: not collective Confession, but individual, because "sin is a profoundly personal reality," and the Eucharist in keeping with the norms, because it "is never anyone's private property, neither of the celebrant nor of the community."

The pope asks the bishops to keep watch over theological activity, to pay attention to the formation of priests, to practice ecumenism without forgetting that "the one Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him."

It is easy to intuit the situations that prompted each of these instructions given by Benedict XVI to the bishops of Brazil: from unbridled liturgical spontaneity to the widespread violation of priestly celibacy.



The pope did not give himself over to describing these situations. Exactly as he did not say a single explicit word – contrary to the expectations of many – about liberation theology. He gave only the slightest outlines of an analysis of the success of the Pentecostal sects.

And he did not meet with any of the leaders of these sects, not even in the brief encounter scheduled in Sao Paolo with the heads of other Christian confessions and other religions.

Instead, Benedict XVI centered all of his preaching on the foundation from which he began in his address to the bishops: Jesus. That is, he carried out the same work of concentrating on the essential that characterizes his encyclical Deus Caritas Est and his book Jesus of Nazareth.

He entrusts the analyses and the course of action to the bishops and delegates of the continental congress that he inaugurated in Aparecida on May 13. He merely pointed out the objective for them.

For example, in regard to the "aggressive proselytism" of the Pentecostal sects, he did not propose a counter-propaganda of the same kind. He instead said, in the homily for the Mass on Sunday, May 13:

"The Church does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by 'attraction': just as Christ 'draws all to himself' by the power of his love, culminating in the sacrifice of the Cross, so the Church fulfils her mission to the extent that, in union with Christ, she accomplishes every one of her works in spiritual and practical imitation of the love of her Lord."

This is a message that Benedict XVI addresses, not only to Brazil or to Latin America, but to the Church all over the world.

[Magister entitled the Pope's address to the bishops of Brazil - "This, and nothing else, is the purpose of the Church..."




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

Indeed, it has always struck me that Protestant ministers and preachers appear to be guided by St. Benedict's first Rule - their message is always 'Jesus says this and Jesus wants you to do this', and like Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, are not hesitant at all to say simply "Christ is the answer" - to all questions and to all problems.

As Pope Benedict has been saying to his fellow priests and bishops on every occasion, they cannot hope to do everything, but if they practice daily intimacy and communion with Christ in prayer, and do the best they can in their concrete tasks, then the Lord will take care of the rest. Can there be any simpler practical words of faith and hope?

The media, as usual, had expectations that Benedict XVI would say some magic formula to reverse the drift among Latin America's largely nominal Catholics towards populist Christian sects, as well as to address Latin American's great social problems.

Jesus is the 'magic' word, but the MSM who cover the Pope as they cover political leaders cannot bring themselves to report it that way, naturally.

Within the Church, however, in order that the bishops and priests may be able to preach Jesus and His word as the answer to life's problems, they themselves must first 'rediscover' Jesus - someone the evangelicals never ever fail to place at the center of their preaching - and re-commit themselves to Him before everything else.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/05/2007 11.58]

Let us say a prayer for him.

A Prelate's Hopes for Brazil Conference:
Interview With Archbishop Robles Díaz,
Published Posthumously


ROME, MAY 14, 2007 (Zenit.org).- The Church in Latin America needs a renewal in pastoral activities, according to Archbishop Luis Robles Díaz.

The archbishop said this in an interview with the FIDES news agency days before he died suddenly on April 7, at age 69.

Mexican Archbishop Robles Díaz was the apostolic nuncio to Cuba and former vice president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

In this interview he expressed his hopes for the 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean.

What fruits should the Church in Latin America expect to obtain from this episcopal gathering?
I think the main fruit of this general conference should be an intense renewal in the Church's pastoral practices. It would be very useful for the reflection to be oriented mainly toward pastoral matters, since that is what the Church in that continent needs today.

What should be done for the Gospel to reach more people? What should be done in order to spread a culture of life? What should be done to strengthen families and to convey to them the model of the Christian family?
In short, I think these and other questions should find concrete answers in the reflection and the dialogue that is to arise between the pastors of the various nations attending, with the assistance of the lay people and experts invited.

Latin America, despite its cultural diversity, and without underestimating the particular identity of each of its peoples, constitutes one large unity; we are one single people with a markedly Catholic culture and identity.

This should be made use of, in order to provide in-depth solutions that, at the same time, are feasible and effective from a practical point of view. We must announce the Gospel and carry out the Church's mission effectively.

In your opinion, what are the grounds for this effectiveness?
I think one should be aware of the main objective and direct all the required means in that sole direction. Our objective is to announce Jesus Christ and to help people - including Catholics - convert to the Gospel.

But we should convey a hope that is not based on merely human objectives: social, economic goals, etc. This hope is based on the concrete person of Christ. Although this may seem an obvious truth, one must bear in mind that a pastor should only convey the model of Christ.

It is obvious that, today, the Church's work, particularly in countries with considerable needs in the economic, social, and political fields, as is the case of many countries in Latin America, should reach all these spheres of human life and offer concrete answers.

But what kind of answers should it provide? What should they be based on?
When the Church's mission becomes intermingled with worldly goals, including the political, economic and social fields, the Gospel becomes ineffective; we, human beings, make it ineffective!

What particular features should characterize this general conference, as distinct from the previous ones?
To answer this question, I prefer to begin the other way around - with what they have in common. One can perceive a clear continuity between these episcopal meetings, from Rio de Janeiro in 1955 to Santo Domingo in 1992.

They are all a response to the prompting of the Spirit during the Second Vatican Council.

There is a permanent renewal in the Church, and this accounts for these great assemblies that have been held successively, in an effort to respond to a concrete and current situation. However, this phenomenon of renewal takes place in continuity with the previous experiences and, particularly, with the conciliar teachings.

I believe, though, in reply to your question, that each general conference has been prompted in a particular and diverse historical context.

Within this continuity, each of these meetings has, in its own way, provided an answer to a concrete situation of the Church at a specific moment. The accumulated wealth is immense!

I don't think the current moment in Latin America calls for any major doctrinal propositions. Over the last 50 years, the magisterium has produced a considerable amount of material that is the result of deep reflection and an acute approach to the Church's current situation.

It is enough to take a glance at the teachings of Pope John Paul II in his apostolic journeys to this part of the world. That alone, together with the documents issued from the previous general conferences, offers an infinite amount of tools to be applied.

That is why I believe that this fifth general conference should give rise, above all, to a renewal in action, but not action centered on political, social, and economic aspects, but rather, on Christ, on the Gospel, on Christian values, on popular and Marian piety, etc.

Within the context of Latin America and the work carried out by the Church, what challenges do you consider most urgent?
I think the most important ones are outlined in my answer to your first question. But I would like to add another one, which I consider essential: vocational work.

Imagine Christ without disciples, without followers; imagine Jesus without apostles; doesn't it seem absurd?

Jesus's entire person was already an invitation to follow him. He summoned his disciples and continues to do so today, in every Christian and, especially, in his pastors.

The Church could not endure without a permanent vocational apostleship. The Lord himself urges us to "pray to the owner of the field that he send workers." But as well as praying for this, one ought to seek it through concrete means.

During the last few years, many attempts have been made to increase the response to God's call, with good results, in some cases, and not so good ones in others.

However, often there has been a loss of confidence in the efficacy of announcing the Gospel, Christ's call, directly, and of defending, openly and sincerely, what the Church actually wants to convey, that Christ is the way, the truth and life.

At times, indirect paths that do not lead to good results have been sought, or attempts to disguise the message have been made, when what is needed is to present it as what it really is. If the Gospel is not attractive in itself, then how can we be convincing?

On the other hand, I think one can appraise the actual value of the means used in evangelization by the vocational fruits they yield.

Therefore, I feel that a great contribution of this fifth general conference would be a renewal in vocations, which, in turn, is highly related to the family, so that a strong campaign should arise in our countries to promote life in the priesthood, in consecrated life, with exemplary models - but a clear and direct campaign, not one which tries to filter through the channels offered by the world, rather, one equipped with its own channel, which is the testimony of pastors.