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Pope Laments Lost Catholics in Latin America NewsMax.com Wires ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE -- Pope Benedict began his first trip to Latin America on Wednesday by committing himself to stemming a hemorrhage of the continent's Catholics to other faiths, and denied the region ranked low as a priority. The German-born Pontiff said Latin America, home to nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, was crucial even though his two-year-old papacy had so far been preoccupied with other issues, like the Middle East and Africa. "It's not that I love Latin America any less. It is the largest Catholic continent and therefore it has the most responsibility," he said, speaking to reporters on board the flight to Brazil. The plane was above the Sahara desert. The Church is losing tens of millions of Latin Americans to protestant branches such as Evangelicals and Pentecostals, which are seen as more charismatic and giving more personal attention than the highly structured Catholic Church. The Pontiff said he would raise the defections issue with Latin American bishops at a conference during the May 9-14 trip to Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic country. "This (the defections) is our common worry. We need to find a convincing response. The success of the sects on the one hand shows that there is a thirst for God, a thirst for religion, that people want to be close to God," he said. In order to confront the problem, the Pope said the Roman Catholic Church had to become "more dynamic in offering answers to this thirst for God". Pope Benedict, 80, said Latin American clergy rightly needed to address social justice issues, but he also encouraged them to keep politics out of the mix. Story Continues Below
This appeared to be a reference to his crackdown on Liberation Theology, which Vatican critics have accused of promoting violent Marxist-style class struggle. "What we tried to do was to free ourselves from an incorrect mix of faith and politics," the Pope said. Before becoming Pope in 2005, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger disciplined clergy who pursued liberation theology when he was head of the Vatican's doctrinal enforcement body. He said those actions were not meant to purge social justice from the Church. "Church teaching on this was not aimed to destroy the commitment to justice but to guide it along the right path, making the correct distinction between the responsibilities of politics and responsibilities of the Church," he said. Church should not be directly involved in politics but give authorities "guidelines" about social legislation, he said. A survey in Brazil's CartaCapital magazine said 41 percent of those polled believed the Catholic Church had not evolved with society. Some 86 percent favoured condom use and more than half did not agree with the Church's stand on abortion. The Pope defended the Church's position: "The Church says life is beautiful, it is not something to doubt but it is a gift even when it is lived in difficult circumstances. "It is always a gift," the Pope said. Abortion is illegal in Brazil but health officials estimate at least two hundred thousand clandestine abortions are performed each year. The issue has been at the centre of public debate since Brazil's new health minister called for a plebiscite on abortion earlier this year.
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