Lapsing Latin America

The Roman Catholic Church is losing ground fast among its 168 million members in Latin America--close to one-third of all the Catholics in the world. This is the considered opinion of a Belgian Jesuit sociologist who has spent the last three years in Chile, is now director of the School of Sociology of Chile's Catholic Pontifical University. The church's difficulties, says the Rev. Roger E. Vekemans in the weekly Ave Maria, began in the 19th century after the Latin American countries achieved independence from Spain and Portugal and thus were thrown open to such influences as Protestantism, spiritism and plain materialism.

The materialism of modern technological civilization has been especially serious in Latin America because of the nature of Spanish Catholicism. "Traditionally, Spanish Catholicism has been highly spiritual, almost mystic. It has never been, as we could put it, an 'Incarnation Catholicism' --it has never been very concerned with man's life in this world." The greatest danger to the church is not from Communism, Protestantism or spiritism as such, but from a Catholicism that is notably "weak in confronting modern progress . . . Since Hispanic Catholicism doesn't seem to be able to make the continent suitable for normal human life, and since, despite the papal encyclicals, the social situation in Latin America is one of the worst in the world, it is quite obvious that the people of Latin America look for other solutions." One of the solutions, particularly for "the lower, lower class": rapidly growing Protestantism (there are some 5,000,000 Protestants in Latin America today).

What can the Catholic Church do about the situation? First of all, more priests are needed. "We have 30,000 priests in Latin America for some 180 million people. To have here a sound proportion between priests and Catholic people (about one priest for 600 Catholics) as we have it almost all over the States and in many countries of Europe, we would need 200,000 more priests in Latin America."

Meanwhile, the population is rising faster and faster. Within 40 years, "if the Church loses Latin America, she loses one-half of her worldwide population. And that could be a crisis within the Church even more serious than the Oriental Schism or the Protestant Reformation." To get more priests, says Father Vekemans, there must be "a big movement of the Catholic countries all over the world toward Latin America. In other words, we lave to see Latin America as a real mission territory--the mission territory of our century."

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