Pope Benedict XVI is on a five-day tour of Brazil wooing the people back to Catholicism …
Pope Benedict XVI is on a five-day tour of Brazil trying to woo its inhabitants back into the arms of the Catholic Church. Brazil is home to nearly half the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics but in the last ten years, the Church’s influence has waned, with Brazilians turning to Protestant evangelical sects or giving up religion altogether. On Sunday the Pope opened a two-week bishop’s conference, which brings together 169 bishops from across Latin America to discuss how the Church can continue to attract members on this “continent of hope.”
During his tour of Brazil, Benedict XVI visited the Farm of Hope, a drug rehabilitation center in the rural town of Guaratingueta, where he listened to the stories of drug addicts and warned Latin American drug cartels that they would face God’s judgment for wrecking so many lives. On Friday, he canonized Fransiscan monk Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvao as Brazil’s first saint. Living in the 1800s, Galvao became known for producing miraculous pills which have been said to cure everything from hepatitis to malformed fetuses. Believers swallow the seed-sized paper pills three times a day for nine days while reciting a prayer to the Virgin Mary. Sunday saw Benedict XVI holding an open-air mass for 150 000 people outside the basilica at the Aparecida shrine, southwest of Sao Paolo. Here resides Our Lady of Aparecida, a statue of a black Virgin Mary, and the patron saint of Brazil. Although many pilgrims traveled far and slept outside overnight in anticipation of this momentous event, the crowd was nonetheless much smaller than the 500 000 that organizers had expected.
The Pope’s message is one of warning against the hedonism of modern society and calling on people to lead more moral lives. Taking the Catholic Church’s most conservative stance, he is speaking out against sex outside of marriage, against birth control, against abortion. Many see this stance as out of touch with today’s realities and at the core of the Catholic Church’s loss of membership. Mexico City’s recent decision to legalize abortion has been severely criticized by bishops and cardinals. Brazilian president Lula de Silva is eager to move the abortion debate forward in a country where it continues to be illegal and women continue to die from illegal, backstreet operations. Benedict XVI and de Silva have also already exchanged heated words on the subject of condom use. The Church has criticized Brazil’s anti-AIDS program which gives away tens of millions of free condoms each year, thus succeeding in keeping HIV infection rates low.
This article was published Monday, May 14, 2007.
