The Religious Consultation
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New York Times, May 10, 2005 Catholic Devotion,
And Doubts DATELINE: SAO PAULO, Brazil Here in Latin America, the great remaining heartland of Roman Catholicism, some Catholics have a blunt warning for Pope Benedict XVI: unless the Catholic Church changes course, it may come close to committing suicide. Latin America sometimes feels a bit like Martin Luther's Wittenberg in 1517, on the eve of the Reformation. There is a growing gulf between many independent-minded churchgoers and grass-roots priests on the one hand, and the cardinals and the pope on the other. ''I resent them,'' said Alessandra Katiane da Silva, a 21-year-old who goes to Mass and was wearing a necklace with images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. She said she could better judge her contraceptive needs than elderly cardinals, then added, ''We have to take care of ourselves, because they're not looking out for us.'' While the Latin American church has a conservative wing, many Catholics seem like Ms. da Silva -- soured by some Vatican dogma but still identifying strongly with a local church and finding spiritual comfort there. The result is that many local Catholic parishes have quietly seceded from the Vatican's control on sexual issues. The pope can thunder against birth control (other than a method based on timing a woman's cycles, derided by critics as ''Vatican roulette''), but 70 percent of Brazilian women use artificial contraception. So the pope pontificates, and his flock here yawns. ''The Catholic Church's ban on condoms doesn't function here in Brazil,'' said Jose Roberto Prazeres, a psychologist at an AIDS center in Sao Paulo. ''We partner with priests to give out condoms.'' A prominent gynecologist, Albertina Duarte, said that she had never had a patient who was so Catholic that she objected to most forms of contraception. ''Never,'' she said. ''Never in my 35 years as a doctor.'' Latin America is still the most dynamic part of the world for Roman Catholicism, accounting for 40 percent of the world's Catholics. But throughout Latin America, the number of evangelicals, especially Pentecostals, is surging, quadrupling in Brazil during John Paul II's papacy. Some Brazilians warn that at this rate Brazil could eventually become a predominantly Protestant country. Some conservatives say the problem is that the church went touchy-feely and permissive after Vatican II, and they note that the evangelical sects gaining ground are more morally demanding, not less. But the more common view here is that the church has squandered its authority with positions that strike parishioners as backward, not uplifting, on divorce, birth control and the role of women. Pope Benedict once fretted that on such issues the church ''risks appearing like an anachronistic construct.'' In an essay written when he was a cardinal, he stuck with traditional values but acknowledged that many foresaw this bleak choice: ''Either the church finds an understanding, a compromise with the values propounded by society which she wants to continue to serve, or she finds herself on the margin of society.'' That's the tug of war being fought in places like Brazil, with grass-roots priests often trying to stay in tune with parishioners, while the Vatican tries to stay faithful to its values. ''There is the hierarchy of the church, and then there's the church that really functions at the local level,'' said the Rev. Valeriano Paitoni, a priest widely admired in Sao Paulo for running first-rate shelters for AIDS orphans. He was disciplined in 2000 for encouraging people to use condoms to protect against AIDS. Most Brazilian Catholics, he said, want to see changes in the church's stance on birth control, homosexuality, marriage of priests and the role of women in the church. ''If the church doesn't have the courage to take these issues up, and listen to science and the world, then there'll be a disaster,'' he said, adding that he is still optimistic that reforms will come. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Vatican responded to reformers like John Wycliffe and Martin Luther by circling the wagons. Luther had hoped to remain inside a reformed Catholic Church, but the pope excommunicated him, and the result was the Protestant Reformation. I can't help feeling that today, Pope Benedict and the cardinals may be facing a similar choice. Unless the Vatican reconnects with ordinary people here in the Catholic heartland, the tens of millions who find spiritual meaning in their pews but have been turned off by many church positions, then the Vatican's obstinacy may yet kindle a Re-Reformation. << New York Times -- 5/10/05 >> |