Palau Power in Latin America

It was the winter league's opening day in the baseball-mad Dominican Republic. Yet 9,000 sweltering Dominicans chose instead to crowd into Santo Domingo's new Sports Palace for a different event: the windup of the "Festival of the Family," a series of revival meetings. As the high-spirited, hand-clapping throng fell silent, a handsome, wavy-haired spellbinder named Luis Palau took the microphones and thundered about an impending "climax of history." After more than an hour onstage, Palau appealed for commitments to Jesus Christ--and converts streamed onto the playing floor.

All told, 105,000 Dominicans attended the twelve "Festival" rallies and 4,000 of them made the commitments to Christ. The first Latin-born Protestant revivalist ever to win wide renown in the region, Palau has preached to the masses in stadiums and bullrings in 17 nations. The middle and upper classes see him on TV answering phoned-in questions. Palau's two daily radio programs are broadcast widely across the continent. The message and the methods are modeled after those of Billy Graham, down to precrusade organization (by a staff of 17) and convert counseling.

Such a career would have been impossible for a Latin Protestant until recently, given the Roman Catholic church's Latin American territorial imperative. But Palau, 42, began his preach ing travels as the Second Vatican Council was deciding that Protestants were not heretics but just "separated brethren." Now even Latin bishops urge their faithful to attend his rallies.

Palau's growing impact was demonstrated during the closing days of the Dominican crusade, when he flew to strife-torn Colombia to address a "Banquet of Hope" attended by 2,500 civic leaders. The principal guest, Colombia's President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, showered Palau with congratulations. He responded with a blunt plea for the Colombian elite to turn to God and foster a spiritual reawakening. The Colombians who arranged the banquet, Palau told TIME, think that "the only ideology that can stop Marxist-Leninism or the disintegration of our society is Evangelical Christianity."

Palau was born into a middle-class Argentine family, and his father died when he was ten. He wanted to become a lawyer to help out widows like his mother; instead he had to work in a bank to support the family. Though baptized a Catholic, Palau attended a tiny Evangelical chapel and was educated at an Anglican college. He began small-time preaching stints as a youth. Later he attended Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Ore., where he now lives with his American wife Pat and their four sons.

Palau insists that the strengthening of Christian morality through widespread individual conversions will counteract social woes in machismo-minded Latin America, where two-thirds of all births are illegitimate. Says he: "In Latin America most men, when they get into their 30s, have had three women, and most have had children with them." The results: abandoned wives, abandoned children, prostitution, fatalism. The President of one Latin American nation told Palau, "We have no loyalty of family, no sense of pulling together. Many of the young men don't know who their real father is." Palau claims that his born-again Christians--most of whom join Protestant churches--stop squandering their money on other women, gambling and drink: "When a man gets converted, he wants to see his children educated. He wants to see his wife elevated. He wants to see his home dignified." Palau's converts willingly testify to such changes.

Colombian Novelist Romulo Gallegos once wrote of Latin America, "She loves, she suffers, she waits." Palau believes this well portrays a continent where people depend on luck and feel that "some day something is going to break." Also, in Palau's view Latin America, with its emphasis on the Cross, is "oriented to a dead Christ. Our emphasis is that he is alive. He can touch your life now, revolutionize your home, make you a different person." The strength of Palau's message--or the weakness of the Latin church--can be seen in the stadiums he fills. -

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