Protestants lure more Catholics
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 8, 2005
VATICAN CITY – A senior Brazilian cardinal on Saturday lamented the rapid growth of Protestant movements in Latin America and wondered aloud how much longer the continent could be solidly Roman Catholic.
The comments by Cardinal Claudio Hummes to the Synod of Bishops reflected increasing concern in the church about the competition for church members in Latin America and Africa.
Hummes cited Brazilian government and church statistics that indicated Brazil’s Catholics, who represented about 90 percent of the country’s population during the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, had fallen to 83 percent in 1991 and 67 percent today.
At the same time, for every Catholic priest in Brazil, there are now two Protestant ministers, he said, according to a summary of his remarks released by the Vatican.
“We ask ourselves with anxiety: How much longer will Brazil be a Catholic country?” Hummes said. “Many indications say the same is true for all of Latin America, and also here we ask ourselves: How long will Latin America be a Catholic continent?”
Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out on a few occasions about the threats to the Catholic Church posed by Protestant groups, including on the first day of the conclave that elected him pope.
During a homily April 18 in which he denounced the “dictatorship of relativism” in the world, he cited the groups – as well as Marxism, liberalism, atheism and agnosticism – as threats to church doctrine.
More recently, in a speech to priests in northern Italy, the pope lamented that Protestants were attracting Africans looking for religion beyond their traditional faiths, and “present themselves as the best, the simplest and the most accommodating form of Christianity.”
