Op-Ed: As Brazil drifts away from Catholicism, the church remains rigid (via latimesopinion)
Last fall, I spent a month in northern Brazil. Although I was there as a rabbi, officiating at services for the Jewish High Holy Days, headlines about the Catholic Church were what grabbed my attention.
This idea shocked the world — but perhaps not the clergy who labor in Brazil and understand the challenges for the church and its congregants there.The church’s status in the Amazon region is precarious. Catholics in isolated areas go months or even years without attending Mass, while evangelical churches are moving into the interior of the country with the outreach strategies that have brought them extraordinary success elsewhere.
, as the bishops did, the question of how to turn around the church’s stunning decline in the region.In some ways, history is repeating itself in his rejection. When I was a congregational rabbi in Rio de Janeiro 35 years ago, John Paul II, known as an anti-Communist, shut down the Brazilian priests who sought to practice liberation theology, a social justice approach to the religion.
Evangelical growth has been spectacular. The Templo de Solomão in São Paulo was built at a cost of $300 million, seats 10,000 worshipers and is as tall as an 18-story building.
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