Pope Urges Renewal of the Church in Americas

Challenging Roman Catholics to “stir up a new springtime of holiness” across the Americas, Pope John Paul II on Saturday laid out a blueprint for a more spiritual hemisphere that would link north and south against the “social sins” of violence and injustice and reject the prevailing doctrine of the region’s economies.

“The time has come to banish once and for all from the [Americas] every attack against life,” the pope told more than 500 bishops from the United States, Canada and Latin America in a plaintive homily at a Mass in Mexico City.

“No more violence, terrorism and drug trafficking,” he exclaimed in English. “No more torture or other forms of abuse. There must be an end to the unnecessary recourse to the death penalty. No more exploitation of the weak, no more racial discrimination or ghettos of poverty. Never again.”

Hunched forward in his seat and clutching his text in a quivering right hand, the 78-year-old pontiff added in a strong voice: “These are intolerable evils that cry out to heaven and call Christians to a different way of living.”

Every sentence of the passage drew sustained applause.

John Paul handed copies of his longer written exhortation, titled “Ecclesia in America,” to church representatives during Mass in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe here.

Tens of thousands of Mexicans attended the Mass or watched it on a giant screen outside the church, Latin America’s most popular Catholic shrine.

The 135-page document is one of five regional agendas being drafted under John Paul’s direction to shape his church’s mission in the new millennium.

Acknowledging in the document that many of the Western Hemisphere’s 496 million baptized Catholics are Catholic in name only, he calls on them to engage in intense prayer and “a personal encounter with Christ.” The church needs “new ardor, methods and expression,” he says, for “a new evangelization of America.”

Such a conversion, John Paul says, can help the Americas overcome poverty and other conditions that he has condemned throughout his 20-year papacy: corruption, environmental pillage, excessive public spending on arms, Latin America’s chronic debt burden and a “culture of death” that tolerates abortion and euthanasia.

What is innovative about the document is the pope’s choice of an audience. It is his first major message to the Americas as a whole--a recognition that north and south are bound increasingly by globalization and such long-standing pan-American issues as immigration, drugs and debt.

“The decision to speak of ‘America’ in the singular,” John Paul explains in the document, “was an attempt to express not only the unity, which in some way already exists, but also to point to that closer bond which the peoples of the continent seek and which the church wishes to foster as part of her own mission.

“In America as elsewhere in the world,” the pope says, “a model of society appears to be emerging in which the powerful predominate, setting aside and even eliminating the powerless.”

He challenges his church “to create an authentic globalized culture of solidarity.”

As he has done many times, John Paul rejects “a purely economic conception of man [that] considers profit and the law of the market as its only parameters.”

More explicitly than ever, he recognizes that this free-market doctrine, which he refers to as neoliberalism, is official policy in more and more of the hemisphere’s countries, and he blames it for swelling the ranks of the region’s poor.

His sharper language echoes an outcry from Latin American bishops who met with their North American counterparts in the Vatican 13 months ago to lay the groundwork for the papal document.

The Latin bishops said free-market prescriptions pressed by international lenders on the region’s debtor countries force them to cut spending on welfare and public health.

John Paul notes that the Vatican has been holding high-level talks with U.S. officials and international lenders in an effort to ease the burden of Latin America’s $697-billion debt.

The pope is likely to repeat the church’s views on debt, abortion and the death penalty when he meets President Clinton in St. Louis on Tuesday en route home after his five-day visit to Mexico.

The United States is one of the few countries in the hemisphere that practices capital punishment.

While the papal document reaffirms a “preferential love for the poor,” it adds a caveat: The church is losing sway among policymakers and other influential members of society.

“If evangelization of the leadership sector is neglected,” the pope cautions, “it should not come as a surprise that many who are a part of it will be guided by criteria alien to the Gospel and at times openly contrary to it.”

John Paul acknowledges a severe shortage of priests in Latin America and rapid gains throughout the hemisphere in recent decades by evangelical Protestant sects at the expense of his church. His document offers a cautious response.

The priesthood must remain male and celibate, he says, and efforts to expand it should reach into indigenous communities without separating seminary students from their cultures. Permanent deacons and lay catechists may be recruited--under existing Vatican guidelines on training and limitation of their ecclesial functions.

Many bishops find the guidelines too restrictive.

“Most lay catechists feel like second-class members of the church,” Msgr. Orlando Romero Cabrera of Uruguay told the Vatican meeting.

Until now, the pope has said little about Protestant inroads in Latin America.

His document asserts that proselytizing by some sects there is aggressive, coercive and “a grave hindrance” to his church’s work. He urges a thorough study on why Catholics in the Americas leave the church.

“It is necessary to ask whether a [Catholic] pastoral strategy directed almost exclusively to meeting people’s material needs has not in the end left their hunger for God unsatisfied, making them vulnerable to anything which claims to be of spiritual benefit,” the pope says.

Catholics can meet the Protestant challenge, he suggests, by promoting religious pilgrimages--hugely popular in Latin American folk culture--while playing down their non-Christian elements. He also recommends more sophisticated use of satellite television and “more personalized religious care.”

“If you’re a parish priest, that means don’t rely on the Internet,” explained papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls.

The pope’s initiative to join north and south is expected to lead to a series of inter-American church meetings on common problems.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles, is organizing such a meeting for December to learn what makes dynamic Catholic parishes tick. There’s also talk of Latin American priests’ moving north as missionaries to minister to newly arrived Spanish-speaking immigrants in the United States.

“We are learning that we have a solidarity that wasn’t recognized before,” Mahony said before Saturday’s Mass. “It isn’t just a matter of the north doing good for the south. The Latin Americans have been far better at equipping lay people to be strong witnesses of the Gospel in public life. We’re more focused on lay ministry within the church. We can learn from each other.”