Catholics Proselytize In New Ways Attempting To Counter Evangelical Christianity
On the sultry shores of Ipanema Beach, the priest was getting funky, rapping in Portuguese on a massive stage with twin bodybuilders in black sunglasses as 5,000 teenagers in bikinis and tank tops bopped and screamed as if they had just witnessed the resurrection of Kurt Cobain.
“Since God is Brazilian, then the pope must really be from Rio de Janeiro!” Father Zeca, 27, the surfer dude/priest yelled at the top of his lungs. The youths cheered, going wild at the reference to a popular local saying about Pope John Paul II, who arrived in Rio on Thursday for a four-day visit.
“We’re here to bring them back to the faith,” the Rev. Jose Luiz Jansen de Mello Neto, stage-named Father Zeca and a local celebrity, said before a Catholic rock concert Sunday to mark the pope’s third visit here, this time for the Second World Conference of the Family.
“We’re finally giving the people the emotion they want, and in the way they want to hear it,” Zeca said. “We are moving into the future … because we have to.”
Father Zeca is an extreme example of the Roman Catholic Church’s new crusade in Latin America to proselytize in modern ways in the face of the unprecedented growth of Evangelical Christianity - especially in Brazil, which has the largest Catholic population in the world.
To fight the spread of evangelical Protestantism, experts say, the Catholic Church is using some of the same tactics. Thousands of Catholics leading the movement here, dubbed the New Missionaries, range from Father Zeca to hosts of pirate radio stations in the shantytowns, to moderators of new Catholic TV talk shows, to a lay army of church representatives who go knocking door to door.
Sao Paulo rolled out the red carpet this week for 700,000 Protestants during the Second World Congress of the Assembly of God. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso attended the religious ceremony, greeting the crowd with a boisterous “Hallelujah!”
“Yes, we are very concerned, and yes, the pope is concerned,” said Catholic Bishop Karl Josef Romer of Rio. “The pope’s visit … is a loving gesture to Christians in Brazil (at a time when) we are addressing the spread of these ‘sects.’ ” Although conversions are happening across class lines, it is in the vast urban shantytowns and poor rural enclaves that Protestant evangelists continue to build new churches at a rapid pace.
It is too soon to judge the success of the church’s latest changes in Brazil.
“But personally, I believe it might be having more success in keeping people Catholic rather than getting back the lost ones,” said Jung Mo Sung, professor of theology at the Catholic University in Sao Paulo. “The Catholics are saying, ‘It’s beautiful to be poor, to be like Jesus.’ But the evangelists are saying, ‘Look, you can have heaven on Earth. You can want money and material things and not feel guilty about it.’ “
Another problem experts see is that even as the Catholic Church modernizes its methods, its teachings remain traditional. In fact, the Vatican has undercut the church’s more liberal leaders in Brazil in recent years, some experts say.