Preparing for the Pope
By MARIE ARANA
Published: June 19, 2013
In April, in the sunlit city of Natal, Brazil, two men knocked on Sandra Abdalla’s door to apply for a painting job. Their pitch, as she described it in an e-mail: they were evangelical Christians and therefore more reliable than the competition. They didn’t drink, raise hell or steal, as a Catholic might. In a country that boasts the largest Roman Catholic population in the world — and a quickly rising tide of evangelicals — those are fighting words. Not least to Pope Francis, an Argentine who will visit Brazil next month, in the first trip of his papacy.
The new pontiff represents many beginnings: first Latin American, first Jesuit, first to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi, first to hail from the Southern Hemisphere, first non-European in 1,272 years. His election represents a clear shift in Catholicism’s center of gravity away from Europe: almost 40 percent of Catholics today live in Latin America and the Caribbean (about 28 percent are in Asia or Africa); in 1910, 65 percent were European. The choice also signals a church in fighting mode. As the late Rev. Edward L. Cleary, an American specialist in Latin American politics, put it, “the future of the Catholic Church lies south of the border.” It is counting on Latin America to save its soul.
For 500 years since the cross was planted in the Western Hemisphere — since the first American priest received his holy orders — the Latin American church has been defined by race and class. Bartolomé de las Casas, the first priest to be ordained in the New World, around 1513, and the first to denounce the oppression of indigenous Americans, turned the theology upside down. Instead of the top-down, rigid hierarchy practiced in Rome, he wanted a grass-roots perspective. The Jesuits, self-proclaimed “soldiers of God,” agreed. For the next 260 years, they often aligned with the continent’s Indians and, as a result, were booted out by Pope Clement XIV, in 1773.
Two centuries later, in the 1960s, as Communism made inroads, Latin American priests rode the winds of the Second Vatican Council to focus anew on poverty and social justice. A full-fledged “liberation theology” followed and, for preaching it, many were excommunicated, some by Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, who retired in February.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/opinion/arana-preparing-for-the-pope.html?_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
