Brazil: Believers flee from the Pope
Believers flee from the Pope
Pope Francis and WELT reporter Tobias Kaufmann
Coyle: Franco Aurelia/Getty Images, Wilt
With Francis, the “Pope of the Poor” from Argentina, the Catholic Church wanted to reclaim lands in South America. But in Brazil, for the first time this year, the number of Catholics will be less than 50 percent. The cause is a homemade problem.
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What Germany lives on a small scale, the Catholic Church experiences globally. Although social organizations and NGOs welcome Pope Francis’ criticism of capitalism, one hardly hears explicit commitments to church or doctrine. Instead, the Catholic Church in Latin America is now facing a historic catastrophe.
According to the calculations of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, the Vatican will lose the largest Catholic country in the world: during this year there will be less than 50 percent of Catholics in Brazil, once almost entirely Catholic, for the first time. Those who hoped that a change of pope would of course fill this loss with new or returning Christians from the left-wing spectrum are belied by the numbers.
There are many reasons for mass migration not only in Brazil but throughout Latin America. First, there are cases of abuse in recent years across the continent. But the problems are deeper. Because Francis messed it up with both classic camps.
Both camps are upset
Conservative Christians are angry that the Pope has not once publicly condemned even the most serious human rights abuses in the leftist dictatorships in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. Instead, he critiques market economics and capitalism at a time when the continent is faced with a massive humanitarian task by a wave of socialist refugees from the aforementioned countries.
On the contrary, in the liberal, progressive left Catholic camp, there is great disappointment that Francis places women who decide to have abortions close to the killers and because he still does not accept same-sex partnerships or leadership roles for women in the church. .
The winners in this development are the evangelical churches, which are only happy to occupy the terrain the pope has cleared: conservative, often right-wing churches that preach a market economy and also provide hands-on training in courses. It seems that this is more attractive to the people of slums than mercy.
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