Excerpts of the Opening Speech of His Holiness to the Fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin America and the Caribbean, delivered in Spanish (mostly) and Portuguese.
The main challenge:
A warning to paganizing "missionaries":
How does the Church change societies?
The most substantial speech delivered by the Pope during his Apostolic Journey to Brazil will remain his blunt Address to the Bishops of Brazil in the São Paulo Metropolitan Cathedral, a pronouncement of whose worldwide implications we will speak shortly.
The main challenge:
...it is true that one can detect a certain weakening of Christian life in society overall and of participation in the life of the Catholic Church, due to secularism, hedonism, indifferentism and proselytism by numerous sects, animist religions and new pseudo-religious phenomena.
A warning to paganizing "missionaries":
The Utopia of going back to breathe life into the pre-Columbian religions, separating them from Christ and from the universal Church, would not be a step forward: indeed, it would be a step back. In reality, it would be a retreat towards a stage in history anchored in the past.Reality and a warning to ideological views of the Church's mission:
What is real? Are only material goods, social, economic and political problems “reality”? This was precisely the great error of the dominant tendencies of the last century, a most destructive error, as we can see from the results of both Marxist and capitalist systems. They falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality which is God. Anyone who excludes God from his horizons falsifies the notion of “reality” and, in consequence, can only end up in blind alleys or with recipes for destruction.
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This political task is not the immediate competence of the Church. Respect for a healthy secularity — including the pluralism of political opinions — is essential in the authentic Christian tradition. If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions. The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests.
How does the Church change societies?
The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit. And we can also see the same thing happening in the West, where the distance between rich and poor is growing constantly, and giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.
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Where God is absent—God with the human face of Jesus Christ—these values fail to show themselves with their full force, nor does a consensus arise concerning them. I do not mean that non-believers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values, even when they are in conflict with private interests.
The most substantial speech delivered by the Pope during his Apostolic Journey to Brazil will remain his blunt Address to the Bishops of Brazil in the São Paulo Metropolitan Cathedral, a pronouncement of whose worldwide implications we will speak shortly.
