El suicidio de la iglesia católica en América Latina

Es común, como ahora escucho a perredistas acusando a panistas, que los que están de un lado de una batalla culpen a otros por sus propios errores. Y en el caso de la conversión másiva de católicos al protestantismo en América Latina, ahora es la jerarquía la que casi acusa a sus fieles de ignorantes, incultos o de casi borregos. La soberbia sin embargo es el primer factor que ciega a la jerarquía a aceptar sus terribles errores en su actuar. La gente no es estúpida, y cuando toma desiciones es por algo serio, más cuando se trata de religión. John Allen explica el sismo religioso que configurará el declinante poder de la iglesia católica en América Latina en este siglo:

"In Latin America, now home to half of the world's Catholic population, Catholicism is actually under siege. Dramatic Protestant gains have come mostly at Catholic expense, creating a historic realignment.

Belgian Passionist Fr. Franz Damen, a veteran staffer for the Bolivian bishops, found that conversions from Catholicism to Protestantism in Latin America during the 20th century actually surpassed the Protestant Reformation in Europe in the 16th century.

Statistics illustrate the point.

Latin American Protestants shot up from 50,000 in 1900 to 64 million in 2000, according to Evangelical scholar William Taylor, with Pentecostal and charismatic churches making up three-quarters of this number. In 1930, Protestants amounted to one percent of the Latin American population; today it's between 12 and 15 percent. A study commissioned in the late 1990s by CELAM, the federation of Latin American Catholic bishops' conferences, found that 8,000 Latin Americans were deserting the Catholic Church for Evangelical Protestantism every day.

Brazil, the largest Catholic country in the world at 149 million, loses half a million Catholics every year. Protestants have grown from nine percent of Brazil's population in 1991 to 15.1 percent (some say as much as 22 percent), while the proportion of Catholics has dropped from 84 percent to 67 percent. In Mexico, 88 percent of a population of 102 million is now Catholic, a decline of 10 percent compared to the mid-20th century.

When the two largest Catholic countries in the world are hemorrhaging, something serious is afoot.

This phenomenon has not escaped the attention of the Vatican. Rarely does a major gathering take place in Rome without discussion of the "sects," the preferred (and slightly pejorative) term for these Protestant bodies. At the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist in October 2005, Cardinal Claudio Hummes of Sao Paolo, Brazil, bluntly asked, "How long will Latin American be a Catholic continent?"

To discuss these trends, I reached out to Samuel Escobar, one of the world's foremost Evangelical scholars specialized in missionary studies. He grew up as an Evangelical in Arequipa, Peru, and splits time between Eastern Baptist Seminary in Pennsylvania and the Board of International Ministries in Valencia, Spain. His 2002 book, Changing Tides (Orbis), examined the growth of Protestantism in Latin America.

The full text of the interview can be found in the Special Documents section of NCRonline.org: Escobar Interview.

PD. Como ven este blog empieza a regresar a su programación habitual. Esperemos que pejelandia siga su curso, y su mesías recobre la cordura. De lo contrario tendremos que regresa a la programación emergente, que la verdad no me es tan grata...