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Read the comments and analysis of scholars on the coverage of the pope's trip to Brazil:
R. Andrew Chesnut is professor of Latin American history at the University of Houston and the author of COMPETITIVE SPIRITS: LATIN AMERICA'S NEW RELIGIOUS ECONOMY (Oxford University Press, 2003) and BORN AGAIN IN BRAZIL: THE PENTECOSTAL BOOK AND THE PATHOGENS OF POVERTY (Rutgers University Press, 1997):
The papal visit to Brazil highlighted what has been the most important transformation of the Latin American religious landscape in the past half century -- the Pentecostalization of Christianity. With some three-quarters of Latin American Protestants belonging to Pentecostal denominations, Protestantism in Brazil and the rest of Ibero-America is essentially a Pentecostal affair. To keep up with the Pentecostal competition, mainline Protestant denominations, such as the Presbyterians and Methodists, now offer Pentecostal-style worships services. More importantly, despite some misplaced emphasis on the part of the media on liberation theology, the Catholic Church has responded rather rapidly with its own version of Pentecostalism -- the Charismatic Renewal. If the number of Latin American seminarians has grown recently and the Church is evangelizing on Brazilian television, it's thanks to the zeal and dynamism of the Charismatics who represent at least a third of church-going Catholics in Brazil. The telegenic superstar of the Brazilian Charismatic Renewal, Father Marcelo Rossi, easily attracts larger crowds than the pope.
Thus, in this context of the Pentecostalization of Latin American Christianity, the bishops meeting in their fifth general conference will probably point to the Charismatic Renewal as their best strategy to take on the Pentecostal competition. Liberation theology and the CEBS (Base Christian Communities) are not only out of favor with Pope Benedict, but for years now also have been eclipsed in fervor and numbers of practitioners by the Renewal. Pope Benedict and the bishops are well aware of the Pentecostalization process and will continue to embrace their own brand of charismatic worship as a way to stanch the exodus of nominal Catholics into Pentecostal churches.
Finally, the pope's obtuse comments on the evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the region were counterproductive, at best. Of all Latin Americans, the indigenous peoples are among those who have most enthusiastically converted to Pentecostalism, especially in Guatemala and Mexico. In the not too distant future, a Brazilian or Mexican pope will lead the Catholic Church more adroitly, especially in those regions where its future lies -- Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Edward L. Cleary is professor of political science and director of Latin American studies at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He is co-editor of RESURGENT VOICES IN LATIN AMERICA: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES, POLITICAL MOBILIZATION, AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE (Rutgers 2004) and POWER, POLITICS, AND PENTECOSTALS IN LATIN AMERICA (Westview Press, 2001):
That Pentecostalism challenges Catholicism and traditional Protestantism has never been as clear as in the recent barrage of media attention focused on the pope's trip to Brazil. First, it demonstrates that competition is good for religious groups, in contrast to the historical Catholic and Protestant monopolies in Iberia and Scandinavia, where Sunday services are mostly unattended. Second, the Brazilian Catholic Church has already begun to respond with a variety of renewal movements, including the charismatic movements and many others. As a result, the church has a much increased workforce, with hope for the future.
The number of Brazilian priests has almost doubled since 1957. Seminarians have increased by 920 per cent in the same period. Thus, the replacement rate is highly favorable. Lay ministers, often the equivalent of Pentecostal ministers, have greatly expanded. More than 30,000 lay missionaries go out to remote areas of Brazil. But most impressive are the 492,000 Brazilian catechists. Catechists are key instruments in the new evangelization of Latin America that began in the early 1990s, and they work positively to counter the Pentecostal challenge.
Journalistic coverage of the pope's visit highlighted that challenge and the numbers "lost" and did very little to look directly at the numbers indicating vitality. Furthermore, for ten years the Catholic Church has enjoyed, Latinobarometro polls confirm, the highest level of confidence of any institution in Latin America. It must be doing something right.
John Burdick is professor of anthropology at Syracuse University and the author most recently of LEGACIES OF LIBERATION: THE PROGRESSIVE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN BRAZIL AT THE START OF A NEW MILLENNIUM (Ashgate 2005):
On the one hand I was pleased to see that the pope's trip was covered every day in the New York Times, on CNN, and on NPR. The coverage appears to have been motivated at least in part by recognition of the demographic, social, and cultural importance of Brazil to the Catholic Church. I am glad to know mainstream North American journalism recognizes that the fate of the Catholic Church lies in the so-called Third World, and therefore a visit such as this merits intense scrutiny.
On the other hand, much of the coverage of the major issues facing the church in Brazil was oddly superficial. In particular, the media's approach to three of the major themes of the visit -- the continuing "threat" of evangelical growth, the question of reproductive rights, and the meaning of liberation theology -- was based largely on stereotypes. What struck me about the coverage was the adoption of the official church position that evangelicals pose a "threat", that they are the enemy, and that they are all pretty much alike. In reality, Protestantism is an extraordinarily diverse religious and ideological field. Many evangelicals are involved at the grassroots in progressive social and political work, and many work side by side with Catholics every day to alleviate hunger, poverty, suffering, disease, and discrimination. Visit most poor neighborhoods and what you find is a kind of popular ecumenism, not the feeling of threat and anxiety articulated by church leaders. NPR began to scratch the surface of this popular ecumenism, but that was the only place I heard this deeper everyday reality touched upon. People are converting to various forms of Protestantism not just because of "emotion," but because these groups actually help them cope with their everyday lives.
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The second problem in much of the coverage was the lack of questioning about how millions of Catholic women feel and think about the issues of premarital sexuality, contraception, and abortion. A veritable industry of research on this over the past twenty years has shown that a large segment of working-class Brazilian Catholic women have come to their own sophisticated analyses of how to reconcile their faith with their liberal views about rights over their bodies. The influence of the women's movement, as well as the pressures of poverty and everyday life, have nurtured a kind of popular theology about these matters that has remained immune to and skeptical of the official Catholic line. Where were these voices?
Finally, I was genuinely surprised by the naive representation in much of the coverage of liberation theology. The pope may still be caught in his thinking in the 1980s, but Brazilian theologians and participants in the grassroots progressive church are not. They long ago questioned the value of an exclusively class-based analysis of their mission and have argued since at least 1989 for a broader vision that focuses on the marginalized in all senses of the term. A crucial part of the movement is its commitment to becoming culturally more diverse in the liturgy. This search for new ways to synthesize spirituality and the struggle for social justice has become central, yet the media seem to have been caught in a very old-fashioned -- and long obsolete -- stereotype of liberation theology as purely interested in material things.
Overall, I wished reporters would have wandered away from the pope's party long enough to learn some of the details of the everyday social and theological realities he referred to in his sermons.
Ivan Petrella is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is also the author of THE FUTURE OF LIBERATION THEOLOGY: AN ARGUMENT AND MANIFESTO (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of LATIN AMERICAN LIBERATION THEOLOGY: THE NEXT GENERATION (Orbis, 2005):
With Benedict XVI's visit to Brazil, liberation theology is again all over the news. It seems like this most important theological movement of the past century is unable to avoid controversy. Why did the most popular pontiff in history, John Paul II, with Cardinal Ratzinger as his bully, try to squash the movement? Why did the latter, now as pope, just last month silence yet another of liberation theology's major exponents, the old and ailing Jon Sobrino? What is it about this way of thinking about God that makes it so controversial?
Liberation theology is controversial because it wrests knowledge away from the wealthy and powerful. In doing so it demands a shift in thinking about the world so radical that it's really nothing less than a conversion. Liberation theology challenges you to think about Christianity from the perspective of the poor majority of humankind rather than the standpoint of the world's small, wealthy minority.
An example: The United Nations Human Development Report once noted that it would take an additional yearly investment of $6 billion to assure basic education for everyone, while $8 billion is spent annually on cosmetics in the United States. The report also noted that an additional $9 billion of investment would take care of clean water, while $11 billion a year is spent on ice cream in Europe. What does this data have to do with Christianity? Until liberation theology came along, nothing. And that's the point.
Traditionally, the Christianity that developed under conditions of wealth in Europe has not dealt with this data in the way it thinks about God. A favorite issue of Vatican theology has been the problems secularization poses to Christianity. But who cares about secularization if you're starving or if your children are dying of curable diseases? It is issues such as these that liberation theology wants Christianity to address.
Liberation theology has often been dismissed as a fringe movement relevant only to the Third World. In grounding itself in poverty, however, liberation theology is the most universal understanding of Christianity we have. From comfy Rome the terrible conditions liberation theology deals with seem extreme and unusual, but they represent the way most of the world barely lives. From a global perspective it's the United States and Western European standard of living that is extreme and unusual.
The New York Times missed something important in the photograph that appeared with its first piece on Benedict's trip under the headline "As Pope Heads to Brazil, A Rival Theology Persists." In the picture, the poster of a smiling Benedict clutched in the dark, gnarled, and worn hands of an old woman was not "heralding" his visit. In fact, it was the opposite. The poster's headline read "Saint Judas." For that woman, Benedict is a traitor to liberation theology in the same way that Judas was a traitor to Jesus.
Despite Benedict's hopes and the hopes of other critics, in those hands liberation theology remains relevant. To me, that's what matters the most.
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