by Marie Arana
BEHOLD, THE NEW HAS COME
It is now obvious that these facile millenarianisms are mistaken. I am convinced that it is here [in Latin America] that the future of the Catholic Church is being decided. This has always been evident to me.
—Pope Benedict XVI, on his flight to Brazil, 2007
When Pope Benedict XVI—formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, who had applied a virtual spiked stick to the backs of liberation theologists in the 1970s—flew to Brazil on his first papal visit in 2007, he was visiting a continent that was home to the vast majority of his flock. At the time, more than half of all practicing Catholics lived in Latin America, a remarkable figure for a religion that had been forcibly, even violently imposed five hundred years before. And yet, his was a visit of desperation.
The pope had carefully chosen Brazil for that inaugural voyage, and with good reason. Brazil boasted the largest Catholic population of any country on the planet. But there was a more pressing justification for that choice: for all its numbers, the Brazilian Church was losing adherents at alarming rates. In the span of a single generation, it had lost a full quarter of its flock to Protestant religions. Most had left in the course of a decade. The pace was startling; worse, there seemed to be no end to the hemorrhage. In the 515-year history of the Americas, the Church had always held a religious monopoly on these lands. Its only challenges had been atheism or the nettlesome recrudescence of some wicked Indian ritual. Things had changed, and they had done so with such velocity that the Church hadn’t noticed until the bleeding had gone too far.
The tectonic shifts in Latin America’s spiritual life have been so swift that it is difficult to report them with precision. The numbers change by the day. But the trend is clear. One out of five Brazilians today is a Protestant; the overwhelming majority of them Pentecostals. In Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—countries that have been racked by bloodshed—one out of three residents has abandoned Catholicism in favor of evangelical rebirth. Throughout the region, from Costa Rica to Argentina, believers are following suit in breathtaking numbers, prompting evangelical temples to sprout by the thousands even as Catholic churches sell off properties to survive. A Protestant conversion would have been unthinkable in most Latin American families just twenty-five years ago, but today it’s a rare family that doesn’t count an evangelical at the dinner table. Indeed, nearly 40 percent of all Pentecostals are estimated to live in Latin America. Nearly all began life as Catholics. Nearly all come from the humbler classes. The poor—victims of a lingering colonialism and toxic racism—are fleeing a church that has claimed them for more than five hundred years.
The phenomenon is, in many ways, part of a larger, seismic repositioning. In the course of the twentieth century, Christianity itself experienced a radical metamorphosis. It flipped hemispheres, fulfilling Pachacuti’s prophecy that the world would eventually turn upside down. The “global north” (North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand), once home to four times as many Christians as the “global south” (the rest of the world), is no longer the most Christian place on earth. Whereas one hundred years ago a full 90 percent of all people in the global north called themselves Christians, only 69 percent do today. To put that in perspective, consider this: in the developed world, a married couple who are devout believers are more than likely to have grandchildren who will never worship in a church. Or this: in Europe, on the very soil where, four hundred years ago, Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other in the bloodiest religious wars in recorded human history, religion is a dwindling enterprise. London’s churches, emptied of worshipers, are reemerging as restaurants. Of the thousand or so churches that were decommissioned and shuttered in the Netherlands in the 2000s, many are now extravagant houses. One is a skateboard park. In Germany, from Berlin to Mönchengladbach, deserted churches have been repurposed as mosques to accommodate a growing Islamic population. In Spain and Portugal, where conquistadors once fell to their knees at the sight of a cassock, monasteries have become resorts that market themselves as “foodie paradises.” The United States is no stranger to this phenomenon: not far from the White House, houses of worship are being sold off as luxury apartments; venerable old churches reopen as breweries.
The opposite is happening in the global south. Over the same period, Christianity has blossomed in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. So much so that the great majority of Christians now live in the Southern Hemisphere, making the developing world an exuberant field of expansion for Catholic missionaries. Even as the Church is struggling financially—even as it has forfeited Europeans to agnosticism, atheism, or sheer indifference—it has won a robust army of believers among the darker races. Much of that success is due to priests of Xavier’s generation, who made it their goal in the 1950s and 1960s to spread the gospel in the Third World. If Catholicism is less white by the day, it is making spectacular gains among the brown.
All the same, as he stepped off his airplane in Rio de Janeiro, Pope Benedict was beset by two pressing questions: Why were Brazilians, Chileans, Argentines, Central Americans—a deeply spiritual people, the beating heart of Catholicism for so many centuries—renouncing the Church for an alien, fundamentalist faith? And how could his priests hold on to these Christian masses, who hadn’t abandoned Jesus at all but were deserting the Church at the rate of ten thousand souls a day? As Pope Benedict had come to realize, the future depended on Latin America. A full offensive was required. Nowhere was that sentiment more fervently held than in the papal conclave, which proceeded to install a sunny South American mender of fences, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on the papal throne when the crusty old German Benedict XVI surprised the world with his resignation in 2013. The weight of Catholicism’s future now fell squarely on the shoulders of Pope Francis I, a Jesuit, a man expected to finish what his generation had been asked to accomplish fifty years before—a man who insisted he wanted a church of and for the poor.
The reasons for the public’s estrangement from the Church had been many. Not least among them, as Pope Benedict pointed out, was the violence that had rattled through the latter half of the twentieth century as terrorists or drug traffickers swept through the Latin American countryside, and anyone who professed leftist views faced brutal retaliation. From Brazil to Nicaragua, dictators and generals had made it clear that pesky priests, liberals with Communist sympathies, warriors for Jesus—like any upstart revolutionaries—would be quashed wherever they were found. One after another, radicalized priests and nuns who dared take up populist causes were targeted, killed, exiled.
The Vatican was soon caught in the cross fire. It had flung wide its gates at the dawn of Vatican II, raising the clerics’ hopes with a firm stand against poverty, only to slam it shut again when it thought they had gone too far. For all the heroics on behalf of the poor, for all the martyred priests and nuns who had made the ultimate sacrifice, the violence that ripped through Latin America in the latter half of the twentieth century—and the Church’s implication in it—frightened away peasants and slum dwellers, who began to flock to Pentecostal temples, choosing a life of the spirit over the perils of the day. As one American pastor put it, “The Catholic Church opted for the poor, but the poor opted for the evangelicals.” Pope Benedict, flying into Brazil to try to win back the fickle soul of a continent, perhaps failed to see the connection: by rejecting one activist priest after another—by siding with power, by protecting the Church’s flanks from any criticism whatsoever, by failing to respond to the meek of the earth, by leaving renegade clerics to construct their own versions of liberation theology—the Vatican had reaped a whirlwind. The stone seemed to be passing into other hands.
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Pope Benedict was not alone. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, among the most beloved pontiffs in Latin America for his support of the “preferential option for the poor,” had also neglected signs of the exodus. Touring South America in the 1980s, he was aware of the influx of evangelicals, but the reception in every country he visited had
been nothing short of rapturous, as biblical crowds gathered to receive him and monuments were erected in his honor. It was easy to think it was just a passing romance. All the same, toward the end of his papacy, there were niggling indications that things were going awry: the increasing risks liberation theologists were taking, the mounting outrage over predatory sexual abuses among the clergy, the Church’s patent unwillingness to address the sins of its own ranks, the various historical amends that needed to be made. Eventually John Paul II issued a resounding apology to the aboriginals of the Far Pacific: “The wrongs done to indigenous peoples need to be honestly acknowledged,” he told Australians and Polynesians forthrightly. “The Church expresses deep regret and asks forgiveness where her children have been party to wrongs.” But the Church had yet to acknowledge its part in the conquest and subjugation of the Americas, a fact not overlooked by the millions of indigent faithful who turned out to receive him year after year in country after country.
On those Latin American visits, the Polish pope had focused his attention on the ills of liberation theology, excoriating its Latin American practitioners and approaching its uniquely regional nature with an authoritarian, Eurocentric point of view. His all-consuming opposition to left-wing politics in general and Communism in particular prevented a more measured evaluation of the realities of Latin America’s dysfunctions. When Bishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador pleaded with him to intercede on behalf of his countrymen and condemn a regime that was turning death squads on its own people, John Paul simply cautioned him to beware of politics and stick with the anti-Communist side. “But Holy Father,” Romero protested with reason, “anti-Communism is what the Right [the proponent of violence] preaches!” Sticking with anti-Communism, the bishop insisted, would mean condoning the death squads. And indeed, the violent right-wing government in El Salvador had proven itself a mortal danger to its people. The National Guard had made it very clear—had said so in a public forum—that it was prepared to kill as many as three hundred thousand Salvadorans, if that’s what it took to squelch a leftist insurrection. At least forty thousand peasants had already been slaughtered, a staggering percentage of the country’s population. The US equivalent would have been more than four million. All the same, the Church did not listen to Romero’s pleas. Months after his visit to the pope to seek mercy for his fellow citizens, the bishop was gunned down and killed in the full light of day while saying Mass in a hospital chapel in El Salvador.
Even then, Pope John Paul II was unconvinced. In a visit to Nicaragua three years later, he publicly denounced priests who had taken political stances, although the evidence of human misery was all around him: two-thirds of the country lived in poverty, infant mortality was at an all-time high, 93 percent of the population did not have safe, potable water. As he addressed the half million Nicaraguans who had gathered to hear him, many of them at patience’s end, he was repeatedly drowned out by hecklers who shouted, “We want peace!” “Power to the people!” to which, visibly irritated, he barked back more than once, “Silence!” When Ernesto Cardenal, a liberation priest, dropped to his knees afterward to kiss the pope’s ring, John Paul snatched it away, shook a finger in his face, and scolded him to “straighten out your position with the Church!” Later, Cardenal had strong words in response: “Christ led me to Marx!” he insisted. “I do not think the pope understands Marxism.” There had been reasons for the Vatican’s blindness to spiraling Protestantism. It had been too busy waging war against its own priests.
When John Paul II finally did turn his attention to evangelical gains in the region, he was curt, dismissive. In a 1992 address to Latin American bishops in the Dominican Republic, which was meant to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing on those shores, the pope warned of “rapacious wolves” among the evangelicals. He accused the intruders of being predators, promoters of “pseudospiritual movements,” sowers of nothing but division and discord. Their money and designs, he warned ominously, were heavily funded from abroad. That message was amplified by bishops throughout the region, who denounced the evangelical initiative as little more than a bald North American invasion, blessed by and paid for by the CIA. They had forgotten, somehow, that the Catholic Church had been forced on the New World by an invasion of its own. The listening crowds, aware of the ironies of “celebrating” the quincentennial of a ruthless conquest, awaited some reference to the Church’s complicity in the violence, but they never heard one. “From the very beginning, the Catholic Church has been a tireless defender of Indians,” Pope John Paul told them instead, citing as heroes, with no irony whatsoever, the very friars the sixteenth-century Church had condemned for raising their voices against the savagery.
Five hundred years after the fact, the head of the Church was making the point Pope Alexander VI had made in 1493: that the Church would protect the First People if they believed in Christ, even though everyone knew better, and even though it was clear that the Indians of 1992 occupied virtually the same rung their ancestors had occupied in 1492—the very bottom. The pope then made a roundabout reference to present-day liberation priests, suggesting that their distractions might be the reason why Latin Americans were wary about Catholicism and looking around for other spiritual masters. “The great masses are without adequate religious attention,” he fretted. “The faithful do not find in their pastoral ministers a strong sense of God.”
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Liberation priests had lost their grip on the people’s pulse. That much was certainly true. Latin Americans had grown weary of so much violence; of the ceaseless rattling of swords that liberation theology had joined. In contrast, Pentecostals, Charismatics, Jehovah Witnesses, and other Protestant denominations were offering belief systems the struggling classes could understand: a more resolute connection to spiritual life and to their communities; a return to the virtues that had made their ancestors strong. In the ancient Inca way of thinking, a muscular code of ethics had been essential to society: Ama suwa, ama llulla, ama qhella. Do not steal, do not lie, do not be idle. What had the conquest given them in its stead? Enslavement. A culture of corruption. Wanton immorality. Rampant poverty. There was a hunger throughout the Americas for a more governed self, a more controlled society, a system that demanded principles and opened the door to a better life. The evangelicals were offering just that.
Pentecostal missionaries flowed into this flagging, angry terrain, proposing an apolitical alternative. Theirs was a brighter future, a way ahead. As one preacher put it, “We have all heard the old song—the song of hatred, sin, racism, intolerance, division, strife, brokenness. It’s time to sing something new.” Worshiping in their ranks, they claimed, offered a direct conversation with God, fewer intermediaries between man and his Creator. Even more attractive in those postcataclysmic years was the sense of order that Pentecostalism promised. Not only was its code of ethics as rigorous as the ancients’, it was downright spartan: a convert was expected to attend religious services regularly, bond with neighbors, reject homosexuals, prohibit drinking, spurn sex before marriage, condemn abortion, decry racism, and place a man at the center of his family (although evangelical missionaries emphasized that it took a good woman to put him there). There was no need to travel a via crucis to reach salvation: conversion alone could win it. They called it spiritual rebirth, instant regeneration, the grace of being born again. Most important, according to missionaries, the Pentecostalist way was the road to upward mobility. Whereas the Catholic Church had told its believers that it was noble to be poor—that the wretched would find a special place in heaven—Pentecostalists were adamant that a believer could have it all right here on earth. They called it prosperity theology, and there was nothing wrong with wanting one’s riches in the here and now.
Today Evangelical Christianity is having groundbreaking ramifications for ordinary Latin Americans. Women, who historically have borne the brunt of poverty and marginalization, now see themselves as agents of change. Although they are not necessarily be
tter off politically as evangelicals, they stand to reform their households by luring men to the faith. A religion that brooks no drink, no extramarital sex, or domestic abuse can have a demonstrative impact on the family. And a family that is healthier, more educated, and more productive will move up the socioeconomic ladder. In countries throughout Latin America, the evangelical church is being credited with the creation of a new middle class. It is also being credited with the transformation of a number of conservative parties. In a funhouse distortion of all history that has gone before, evangelicals are joining right-wing political parties that historically have been oppressors of the poor, yet align with their socially conservative views on gay rights, abortion, and the role of women. Strangely enough, on the basis of these abiding shibboleths of culture, the Catholic Church cannot disagree.
