Today, the church in South America is threatened not by Marxism but by the gradual drift of its faithful toward
evangelical Protestantism, which offers a more direct relationship with God.
With the largest slice of the world’s estimated 1.2 billion Catholics, about 28
percent, living in South America, this is
a slide the Vatican can ill afford to ignore.
It comes naturally, then, to Francis, who became a priest
in Argentina’s politically engaged church hierarchy, to adopt a populist political tone to combat that drift. He speaks
directly to the region’s poor with a fire found in the “liberation theology” that
inspired South America’s leftist revolutionaries of the 1970s.
Pope
Francis, who firmly disapproved of armed resistance, was not at first a
supporter of liberation theology. But his thinking evolved.
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