Amid New Challenges, Pope Arrives in Mexico

Twenty years ago this week, the Latin American bishops of an ideologically divided church gathered in Mexico to hear their new pope, on his first mission abroad, proclaim a message that was to shape the politics of his reign and those of the world’s most Roman Catholic region.

The church’s “preferential love for the poor,” said Pope John Paul II, must not mean hatred or exclusion of the rich. Bishops and priests are “spiritual guides,” he declared, not politicians, subversives or revolutionaries.

Returning here Friday, John Paul found a church less riven by partisan passion, more focused on the daunting material poverty of its flock but increasingly alarmed by the limited reach of its overworked clergy.

Catholicism today in Latin America, home to 442 million of the church’s 1 billion faithful, is defined largely by its complex and powerful father in Rome. Thanks in part to his charisma, the church’s grass roots--its seminaries and lay organizations--are more vibrant than ever. Yet his conservative dogma, many Catholics argue, has handicapped this revival, leaving the church behind Protestant rivals in the quest for converts.

His outspoken defense of human rights has made the church a protagonist in Latin America’s transitions from military to civilian rule. But his curbs on the clergy’s ties with socialist movements have paralleled the rise of a capitalism that, to his dismay, has widened the continent’s gap between rich and poor.

“The pope is the most powerful voice challenging the injustices of the global free-market economy,” said Father Luis Farinello, a priest in a blue-collar parish of Quilmes, Argentina. “He has focused the entire church more clearly on its mission in defense of the poor. But this church is still too hierarchical, too inflexible, too distant from the people.”

On no other continent does Catholicism wield as much spiritual and temporal influence. But as he assumed the papacy in October 1978, Karol Wojtyla, the anti-Communist Pole, looked at Latin America with alarm, seeing a church being shaped by leftist “liberation theology” and torn by Cold War conflicts.

He moved quickly to rein in this theology, which blended Catholic teachings with Marxist analysis to justify class struggle and promoted a “people’s church” of radical priests and lay Catholics with loose ties to the church hierarchy.

After silencing the most radical exponents and ridding seminaries and Catholic universities of their teachings, John Paul quipped a few years ago: “It seems that I am the only liberation theologist left.” His drive to usurp and redefine their doctrine has brought him to Latin America more often than to any other continent besides Europe; his four-day visit to Mexico City is his 17th to the region.

This time he brought a message for North American Catholics as well. Welcomed at the airport Friday by a mariachi band, the pope said he had come to issue his blueprint for a “new evangelization” of the entire Western Hemisphere in the next millennium. The document is to be released at a Mass today.

“The church wants to reveal the best of its identity: to be closer to Christ and his word, to be a better servant of man . . . to be an agent of unity and not the division of humanity,” he declared before riding his popemobile into the city past hundreds of thousands of adoring Mexicans. Children shouted in chorus: “El Papa, El Papa, Rah, Rah, Rah!”

Most of the bishops who came from across Latin America to greet the pope here Friday were appointed by him and are far more conservative than those he encountered 20 years ago.

Yet during their last meeting with the pope, at a Vatican synod in December 1997, these bishops sounded remarkably like their predecessors. One by one, they condemned what many called “sinful structures” of the region’s economy--its $697-billion foreign debt and the budget cuts demanded by creditors that hit the poor the hardest.

Many bishops say they feel beleaguered by the chronic poverty of a Catholic flock that earns below the regional average. According to a recent World Bank study for the Vatican, Latin America’s economic growth in the 1990s has only enlarged the income gap between the richest and poorest tenths of the population.

The anti-capitalist rhetoric by conservative bishops is a sign that the rift in the church is healing. The end of Cold War-driven guerrilla conflicts and divisive military regimes has helped. So has the radical theologians’ retreat from demands for greater democracy within the church.

“They’re all speaking the same language,” said Father James Ronan, head of the Latin America secretariat at the National Catholic Conference of Bishops in Washington. “The pope has canonized the phrase ‘preferential option for the poor.’ It has come into the mainstream of the church. Any pastor can now stand up and speak about ‘liberation’ without getting shot by the left or the right.”

Vatican conservatives now acknowledge that the leftist Catholic ferment of a generation ago--the era of martyred priests, nuns and bishops--was a long-term boon for the church’s understaffed ministries.

“Young Latin American men saw an institution facing down the powerful and defending the masses, and logically they wanted to become priests,” said Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, a Colombian who is prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Clergy.

By Vatican count, the region’s clergy has grown from 49,000 priests in 1979 to 59,000 today--not quite enough to keep pace with the growing Catholic population. But Castrillon said the number of native-born priests has grown 44% in that period to assume a bigger proportion of the clergy--more than half--as the number of foreign missionaries declines.

Even better for the church, the number of native seminarians has more than doubled--from 13,000 to nearly 28,000--in those two decades, fed by recent explosive growth in Central America.

But no one believes that the growth is enough. Latin America still has only one priest per 7,140 Catholics (the United States has one priest per 1,294 Catholics), and in many poor areas the scarcity is greater. Father Farinello ministers to 30,000 faithful in Quilmes.

Still, his Our Lady of Lujan Parish has enough lay activists--200 who volunteer most days--to feed 1,300 needy people at 11 soup kitchens and run a free neighborhood clinic, a day-care center, a co-op for people building their own dwellings and a nonprofit diaper factory.

John Paul’s papacy has seen a proliferation of such enterprise across Latin America--unchecked by the rise of democratic politics that drew many lay activists away from the church.

“The social activism within the church of the ‘90s is much less ideological than it was in the ‘80s,” said Regina Novaes, director of Brazil’s Higher Institute of Religious Studies. “Today’s church stands for less theory and more action.”

The inspiration comes not just from the pope. Protestant churches have nearly tripled their Latin American followings in the past three decades and now number 40 million. Catholics feel compelled to adopt their techniques, deploying everyone from pirate radio evangelists in the slums to Bible-toting missionaries who go knocking door to door.

John Paul frets about “confusion and uncertainty” in his flock over the spread of Protestantism, which is especially attractive to the poor. Many Latin America Catholics want him to do something radical about it, such as ending the church’s unpopular bans on birth control, opening the priesthood to married men and easing distinctions between clergy and lay catechists.

The pope has ruled out debate on those proposals so often, however, that the region’s bishops and theologians have stopped bringing them up.

“Nobody wants more confrontation inside the church,” said Father Pablo Richard, a Costa Rican theologian who teaches one-week Bible courses across the region. “We’re all working humbly to spread the Gospel and stand up for the poor.”

That mission continues to put the church at odds with the state. Brazilian bishops, for example, angered President Fernando Henrique Cardoso with a moral defense of massive, organized looting of supermarkets by thousands of hungry people during a drought in the northeast last year.

The Vatican’s less confrontational approach underlies a closely watched initiative of its own--a series of high-level talks begun in mid-1997 with executives of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Instead of demanding a debt write-off for Latin America, which some bishops advocate, Vatican officials are seeking mutual understanding on how to manage lending and debt-relief packages for the benefit, not the detriment, of the poor.

The Vatican’s most radical critics applaud the idea but say they doubt that John Paul’s rigid church has the audacity or imagination needed to sway the bankers.

“One priest, one bishop, one pope cannot enforce an idea on his own; he needs to mobilize an army of believers, the people of God,” said Jon Sobrino, a theologian at El Salvador’s Catholic university. “That capacity is what the church is losing. Without it, the powers of the world won’t listen.”

Times staff writer James F. Smith in Mexico City and Paula Gobbi of The Times’ Rio de Janeiro Bureau contributed to this report.

* MASS MARKETING: Corporate sponsorship of Pope John Paul II’s visit to Mexico draws many critics. A10