Sunday, January 24, 1999
Pope calls for new activism
BY MOLLY MOORE and JOHN WARD ANDERSON
The Washington Post
MEXICO CITY — Pope John Paul II, in a dramatic speech Saturday, exhorted church leaders to become more aggressive in fighting repression, corruption and intolerance.
He delivered the call-to-arms, aimed at resuscitating deteriorating Catholicism in the Americas in the next millennium, before thousands of church officials in the Basilica of Guadalupe.
In the speech, carried live by television networks across Latin America, the 78-year-old pontiff declared, “The time has come to banish once and for all from the continent every attack against life — no more violence, terrorism or drug trafficking; no more torture or other forms of abuse.”
The pope is using his four-day visit to Mexico City and one-day stopover Tuesday in
St. Louis to reverse the decline of a church that is losing members across Latin America. Millions of the once-faithful have turned to evangelical faiths that they find more receptive to the plight of the poor and oppressed.
Saturday, the pope chose one of the most venerated Catholic sites in Latin America to issue his summons.
The pontiff told 5,500 clerics inside the basilica and tens of thousands of people listening outside to loudspeakers, that the church “must speak out with prophetic force against the culture of death,” adding, “As a matter of urgency, we must stir up a new springtime of holiness on the continent so that action and contemplation will go hand and hand.”
He said he planned to enforce that action with a new church doctrine for the Americas which he signed in a ceremony shortly after arriving Friday in Mexico City, his fourth visit to Mexico in 20 years.
The document, compiled as the result of a monthlong meeting with American clergy at the Vatican in 1997, attempts to balance widely differing social, economic and cultural issues. To appease women, he urged their greater participation in the church, “including the decision-making processes, especially on issues which concern them directly.”
But he did not address the issue of allowing women into the priesthood and reinforced his stand against abortion. He also repeated one of his favorite themes — that globalization and capitalism should not be permitted to push the poor deeper into poverty.
The document marks an evolution in the church's approach to the Americas and attempts to instill in the Catholic doctrine some of the principles that have drawn its followers to Protestant evangelical faiths.
Although the pope has gained much acclaim worldwide for his role in contributing to the fall of communism in Europe, he has presided over massive defections from the Catholic Church in the Americas, home to more than half of the world's one billion Catholics. In Mexico, which has the second-largest Catholic population of any country, evangelical churches and others have siphoned off as much as 10 percent of Catholics in recent decades. Demographers say numbers indicate that about 87 percent of Mexico's 95 million people consider themselves Catholics, compared to an estimated 94 to 96 percent a few decades ago.
Today's updates by Associated Press
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Pope's schedule
Pope calls for new activism
Pope wants to open arms to rich, elite
