Shortly before dawn one Sunday this month, 214 left-wing Roman Catholics — including six priests and two nuns — "captured" the cathedral in Santiago, Chile. Barricading the doors against all outsiders for 15 hours, they celebrated an informal liturgy, then issued a manifesto denouncing Pope Paul's scheduled visit this week to the 39th International Eucharistic Congress in Bogota, Colombia. "Christ does not need masses of people singing in the streets, or acclaiming his vicarage, or thousands of wax candles," said the declaration. "The Christ of the poor needs courageous action aimed at changing the conditions of the Latin American people." The Santiago rebels charged that the Pope's presence will only ratify "the alliance of the church with military and economic power."
The bizarre episode illustrated the explosive condition of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. As never before in its history, reports TIME Correspondent William Forbis, it faces an internal crisis that is both spiritual and political, partly because it contains outspoken extremes of rebellion and reaction. A vociferous, militant minority of radical priests, prelates and laymen argue that the church must embrace revolution, even Marxism, to survive. Traditionalist bishops warn that Christian support of social upheaval would bring on Communist dictatorships, and with it the death of the church.
Nominal Bastion. Vatican officials like to think of the continent civilized by cross and sword as a bastion of Christianity. It is something less than that. Although 90% of Latin America is nominally Catholic, probably fewer than 10% of the people practice what the church preaches. Thousands turn out for such semireligious spectaculars as Lima's festival honoring Our Lord of the Miracles, but grandmothers and schoolchildren are often about the only worshipers at Sunday Mass in the ancient, silent churches. In Brazil, perhaps 25 million people are devotees of a voodoo cult called macumba. Across the continent, the zealous, fundamentalist Pentecostal sects constitute the fastest-growing faith.
Even worse, the church lacks the ecclesiastical manpower to serve the sheep still within the fold. The ratio of priests to laymen in Latin America is 1 to 5,600 (in the U.S. it is 1 to 785). The Catholic seminary in La Paz, Bolivia, currently has only one seminarian; when he is ordained, he will be the institution's first new priest in four years. Almost half of the continent's clergy are foreigners, most of them Spaniards, Italians and Irish-Americans. More often than not, they are better-educated and more zealous than the native priests, but inevitably, they are also separated to a large extent from the culture of their parishioners.