Evangelicals Challenge Catholic Church's Dominance In Brazil

[Apotheoun]

Evangelicals challenge Catholic Church's dominance in Brazil

 

As Brazilian Catholics celebrate the first Latin American pope, the church has a close eye on shifting dynamics in the world's most Catholic country.

 

SAO PAOLO, Brazil — When Pope Francis makes his first scheduled overseas trip to the world’s most Catholic continent, he will be guaranteed an ecstatic welcome. 

 

By happy coincidence, this year’s World Youth Day is being held in Rio de Janeiro in July and with papal attendance confirmed, Latin Americans will have an early chance to see the first pope who is one of their own. Around 40 percent of the world’s Catholics live in the region, with Brazil being the world’s most populous Catholic country – 64.6 percent of its 191 million citizens say they are faithful to Rome.

 

But if Francis wants to see firsthand the challenges the Vatican faces in the region, he should visit Rio’s notoriously violent slums. Here the youth are restless and evangelical church halls run by homegrown Protestant pastors appear on every second block, a pattern repeated on the poor periphery of most Brazilian cities.

 

As if following Europe, where the Catholic Church is besieged by secularism and apathy, most middle class Latin Catholics no longer pay attention to the church’s teachings on contraception and divorce while left-leaning governments increasingly legalize same-sex marriages and chip away and the region’s draconian anti-abortion laws. Many young Brazilians are turning away from the church and nearly 10 percent now say they follow no organized religion.

 

But in Latin America the greater threat to Rome is evangelical Protestantism, which is on many social issues often even further to the right.

 

Rio is the capital of a veritable Brazilian Reformation in this country that has seen Rome lose more souls in recent decades that it did during the European Reformation in the 16th century. Bible-thumping backstreet pastors compete with larger, well-organized neo-Pentecostal churches such as the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, The World Church of the Power of God and New Life to attend to the spiritual needs of Brazil’s urban poor.

 

The rise of Brazil’s evangelical movement has hit the Catholic Church hard. For centuries it enjoyed a religious monopoly in the country. More traditional Protestant churches such as Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists were confined to the margins of Brazilian society.

 

As recently as 1991, 83 percent of Brazilians defined themselves Catholic. By 2010 that percentage had fallen below 65 percent. In less than two decades Rome lost more than a fifth of its Brazilian faithful. If the rate of loss of the last two decades is maintained into the next two, by 2030 Catholics will be a minority in Brazil where already 22.2 percent of the population identifies as evangelical Protestant.

 

This change in Brazil’s religious profile reflects a deeper revolution in its society which entered the 20th century a rural, agricultural society and exited it urbanized, industrialized and increasingly in the grip of a rampant consumerism.

 

“The migration from the country to the city was very important for the growth of evangelical groups,” says Professor Orivaldo Pimental Lopes Jr., a sociologist who has studied the rise of Brazil’s new Protestant churches. “Traditional connections were broken.”

 

These migrants arrived by the millions in cities such as Rio and São Paulo where authorities were unprepared to receive them. Here migrants built the slums where traditional institutions did not reach, leaving many without such basic services as running water or a parish priest. It was into this gap that the evangelicals stepped.

 

 

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[mortify]

What worldview doesn't challenge Catholics these days?

[Apotheoun]

What worldview doesn't challenge Catholics these days?

I agree, three is nothing new in the challenge, but what is new is the explosive growth of the Evangelical / Pentecostal Protestants in Brazil, because they now make up 22 percent of the population.