Ten Million Protestants

The Catholic Church relies principally on tradition and takes it for granted that children of Catholic parents will be good Catholics. Protestant evangelists are more aggressive; they go out and try to reach people who have lost contact with their church." The speaker was Buenos Aires' Methodist Bishop Sante Uberto Barbieri, and as he spoke last week, some 22,000 Protestants--laymen and women as well as ordained ministers--were busily evangelizing Latin America in a Protestant movement that is reaching major proportions. Protestant missionaries face the spears of Ecuador's Auca Indians; they educate--and influence--Catholic children squeezed from parochial schools by the continent-wide shortage of classrooms; they befriend the thousands of bewildered European and Asian immigrants who arrive each year only to run up against the language-barricaded snobbery of many Latins.

In a hemisphere where better than 90% of the people in almost every mainland country are baptized Catholics, the number of Protestant converts has jumped into the millions. Bishop Barbieri estimates a Protestant church membership of 5,000,000, a total Protestant community of 10 million, including all children, teenagers and others who for one reason or another have not formally announced their Protestantism. Brazil alone, says the bishop, has a community of 4,000,000 Protestants. Even by Catholic computation, the figure last year was 4,825,000 for South America, and Catholics admit that the totals are growing by leaps and bounds.

The heavy Protestant invasion is partly due to the fact that the Far East, long a prime missionary target, has been largely closed by war or Communism for the past two decades. But it is not the only reason. While there are five times as many Catholic priests, nuns and brothers in Latin America as there are Protestant churchmen and women, the Catholics must tend their already established flocks, while Protestants can put more time and money into missionary work. Protestant missionaries supply remote outposts with their own airlines (TIME, Jan. 6), run their own radio networks, gave away free nearly 5,000,000 Spanish-and Portuguese-language Protestant Bibles in 1956 alone.

So rapidly is Protestantism spreading that the Vatican has paid it the compliment of being seriously concerned. Pope Pius lists "four mortal perils" that are threatening the Catholic Church in Latin America. Among them, "Protestant invasion" ranked high.*

* The other mortal perils: Communism, secularism and "a disquieting spiritism."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.