The Catholic Church in Brazil

In: Journal of Interamerican studies and world affairs, Band 13, Heft 2, S. 279-295

Abstract

The church in Brazil suffers many but by no means all of the ills usually ascribed to Catholicism in Spanish American countries. Concern over these problems has grown throughout the Catholic world, as well it might. One-third of the world's Roman Catholics live in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere. According to many churchmen a state of spiritual bankruptcy confronts the church in most of these countries. Basically it is a matter of the irrelevance of a system still rooted in hierarchic and paternalistic spiritual guardianship among people in transitional societies whose goals are modern, affluent egalitarianism. In simpler terms, more and more people in Latin America learn about widespread wealth among others, and fewer and fewer believe that their own disadvantages are preordained and can be changed for the better only in the next world—as the church has long taught.