A Protestant Reformation is sweeping Latin America. Over the last generation, churches like E1 Verbo have challenged Roman Catholicism in a struggle for the souls of the faithful. The pope’s opinion of such upstarts is no better than their opinion of him. John Paul alternately belittles the Protestants as no-account “sects” and denounces them as “ravenous wolves . . . causing discord and division in our communities.” No one knows exactly how many Protestants there are in Latin America – some estimates run from 40 million to 60 million-but everyone agrees the number is exploding. Every day, on average, about 8,000 baptized Catholics become Protestants.
The Latin American Reformation in-eludes many mainline Protestant churches: Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian. But the fastest-growing congregations are the Pentecostals, passionate believers who sometimes speak in tongues and practice faith healing in services that throb with music and testimony. “The Catholic God is a dead God,” says Aderito Barbosa, a retired Rio de Janeiro police sergeant and lapsed Catholic who “crone to Jesus” five years ago. Now he sits, clasping a hymnal, outside a suburban Assembly of God church, packed with chanting and swooning worshipers stirred up by a 10-piece band.
Pentecostal converts typically become sober, hardworking, law-abiding citizens.
A Protestant ethic seems to take hold, so much so that many employers try to hire clean-living believers. “Personal holiness is reflected in respect for truth, family and property,” says Pastor yuan Jose Rivas, a Peruvian minister. Some of the Pentecostal churches, such as the Assembly of God, were originally transplanted from North America. U.S. churches still send money and missionaries, and last year televangelist Pat Robertson started broadcasting to the region. But by now, Latin America’s Protestant Reformation has become almost entirely a homegrown movement. “These people embrace Protestantism because it’s like a liberation,” says Abdias Tovilia, a Protestant pastor in Mexico’s Chiapas state, where downtrodden indigenous peasants began a guerrilla uprising in 1994. ‘It’s the way out of a social system that does little more for them than keep them drunk and dirt poor."
For many poor Latin Americans, the Catholic Church is the social system’s house religion. The pope knows that, and he knows he’s in for a fight. Last week he called for a “new missionary effort” to combat the “disruption caused by sects,” particularly in Latin America. This week he visits three countries that are hotbeds of Protestantism: Guatemala, Nicaragua and E1 Salvador. At his final stop, in Venezuela, John Paul will visit the notorious Reten de Catia prison, blessing inmates there.
In the 1960s, some Catholic priests embraced “liberation theology,” an activist blend of Catholicism and Marxism. By now the conservative John Paul has suppressed the leftist aspects of liberation theology, insisting that the church must avoid politics and focus on its spiritual mission. Yet the Catholic Church has always played at least a passive role in Latin politics, upholding the traditional order.
Phillip Berryman, a former Catholic priest in Latin America who now writes about religion there, thinks John Paul will again try to play to an “establishment audience” this week, arguing that Latin American culture is Catholic culture and that the new denominations are illegitimate and foreign-in other words, North American. The pope, Berryman suggests, will appeal to the cultural pride of Latin elites as much as to their religious sensibilities. In so doing, he adds, “the Catholic Church risks becoming an empty shell” by losing touch with ordinary parishioners. And that is precisely what has enabled the Protestants to convert 8,000 Catholics a day.
