The Hemisphere: Meeting of the Red Hats

Five Latin American cardinals,*18 archbishops and 19 bishops met in Rome last week to find solutions for the Roman Catholic Church’s imposing problems in Latin America. The prelates were attending a meeting of the Latin American Bishops’ Council (CELAM), a church agency founded in Rio in 1955 to coordinate Roman Catholic activity in Latin America, held for the first time outside the hemisphere. They were joined in their sessions, held in the Latin American College on the banks of the Tiber, by high Vatican clergymen. Before the conference ended they were received by Pope John XXIII.

The two main problems facing the Catholic Church in Latin America are a shortage of priests and heavy inroads by Protestantism. To overcome them, Archbishop Antonio Samore, a member of the Vatican State Secretariat, described a “positive” approach. “We are not against anyone or anything,” he said. “We just strive to strengthen our own faith, to increase the number of our priests and to make their work more effective.”

Successful Protestant missions, organized and financed by rich congregations in the U.S., have pushed Latin America’s Protestant community from a mere 170,000 in 1916 to nearly 5,000,000 today. To halt this trend, CELAM wants more clergymen. Latin America has 35% of the world’s Catholics but only 8.7% of its priests. CELAM’s plan is to establish new seminaries in Latin America to train native clergy. In the meantime, it wants more Spanish and other foreign priests to fill the gap.

To beef up apostolic firepower and increase its range. CELAM will make heavy use of radio and TV. Priests hope to supply remote communities with more radios to pick up religious programs broadcast by church transmitters. To finance the new drive, the church hopes to raise some money in Latin America, more in the U.S.

Politically, CELAM will favor “flexible” democracy rather than the authoritarian governments it once preferred. It will support welfare programs to attract workers. Said one prelate: “The church in Latin America has awakened to the fact that Christian sociology is not incompatible with a great number of modern social concepts. The church believes in narrowing the gap between classes. There will always be rich and poor, but they need not be so far apart as they are in Latin America.”

*Santiago Luis Copello and Antonio Caggiano of Argentina, Crisanto Luque of Colombia, Carlos Maria de la Torre of Ecuador and Jaime de Barros Camara of Brazil.