Pope’s Strategy: Bolster Latin Catholicism : Religion: In Brazil, John Paul sets guidelines for hemisphere bishops’ conference next year.

In a 10-day journey to Brazil, Pope John Paul II has raised issues and set guidelines for a major conference of Latin America’s bishops next year marking the 500th anniversary of Roman Catholicism in the Western Hemisphere.

More than 30 homilies, speeches and other pronouncements in Brazil spelled out the Pope’s commitment to social and economic justice, while stressing spiritual needs and rejecting church alignment with political ideologies.

It was a discourse designed to unify divided conservative and progressive Catholic factions in the common tasks of repairing church weaknesses and reinforcing the frayed fervor of its huge Latin American fold.

John Paul II left this eastern Brazilian city Monday morning on a 10-hour flight back to Rome. He will return to Latin America next Oct. 12, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World, to meet with the region’s Catholic bishops in the Dominican Republic.

The topic of that conference will be “new evangelization, human promotion and Christian culture.” The meeting’s importance to the Vatican is fundamental, because the church has been losing ground for years in this region.

During the Brazilian tour, John Paul II outlined what may be interpreted as a broad strategy for strengthening Latin American Catholicism:

* A “climate of apostolic fervor” is needed in efforts to spread and deepen Catholic faith. “The great hopes that the Latin American Catholic world vests in the meeting of bishops next year in Santo Domingo are testimony already to the unceasing clamor of so many souls, calling for a new evangelization that touches deeply in the life of the faithful and particularly in their Catholic identity,” the Pope said in the city of Natal.

The church must revive traditional Latin American “joy and holy pride” in being Catholic to “occupy the areas” where evangelical Protestants have been moving in.

* Priests are encouraged to help seek “a Christian answer to the pressing hunger for bread and justice.” But such efforts are valid only if they are “profoundly evangelical.”

Liberation theology, an activist movement within the church that has been strong in Brazil and some other Latin American countries, must not be based on Marxist analysis, according to the Pope. He warned priests against getting involved in politics.

* The church recognizes free enterprise as a source of social progress, but it rejects “savage capitalism,” characterized by “unrestrained profit-seeking, together with disrespect for the primordial value of work and the dignity of the worker,” John Paul said in the city of Victoria. This position obviously has mass appeal for Latin American labor.

* Effective Catholic evangelization requires getting back to the basics of catechism and Christian values.