IF ONE can apply the term to a 78-year-old prelate who has turned lack of ostentation into an art form, then Pope Francis is a rock star. Or at least that is how he is being greeted in Latin America this week. Hundred of thousands have turned up for open-air masses in Ecuador, with more to follow in Bolivia and Paraguay. Yet the eight-day tour—the longest foreign trip so far in this papacy and the first to Spanish-speaking America—may do more than underline the popularity in his home region of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Latin American pope. It may add political definition to his papacy.
Still home to 40% of the world’s Catholics, Latin America has seen a swift advance of evangelical Protestantism in the past 40 years. Yet according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank in the United States, Paraguay (where 89% are Catholics), Ecuador (79%) and Bolivia (77%) remain bastions of the faith, along with Colombia and Mexico.
The pope’s most obvious purpose is to keep them that way by making the church more welcoming and more relevant. In Guayaquil, in Ecuador, in a mass celebrating the family (“the best social capital”) he spoke of...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1HPUEQG
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