SÃO PAULO, Brazil — On May 9, Pope Benedict XVI will cross the Atlantic Ocean for the first time as a Pope to visit Brazil. Why is the 80-year-old Holy Father making the trip?

The Pope is scheduled to hold a meeting with the Brazilian bishops, meet young people in São Paulo and visit a famous drug recovery facility in the nearby town of Guaratinguetá.

But the reason for the Pope’s trip is a critical event for the future of the Church in Latin America: the Fifth General Conference of Latin American Bishops, which will take place in the Marian shrine of Aparecida, about 200 miles north of São Paulo.

The Latin American General Conference of Bishops is an event with no equivalent in other regions. Bishops from all the bishops’ conferences in Latin America gather to establish common pastoral guidelines for the next 10 to 15 years.

The tradition goes back to 1955, when Pope Pius XII called for a more collegial, unified approach among Latin Americans and convoked the first General Conference in Rio de Janeiro.

The second conference took place in Medellín, Colombia, in 1968 — after the Second Vatican Council.

The third happened in early 1979 in Puebla, Mexico, amid the theological tensions sparked by the Marxist-inspired “Liberation Theology,” and was the occasion for the first trip of Pope John Paul II’s pontificate.

In 1992, on the occasion of the Fifth Centenary of the Evangelization of America, the Fourth General Conference of Bishops took place in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, in the context of a world that had just seen the fall of the Soviet Union, whose existence was so influential in Latin America.

Many believed the general conferences would become a thing of the past when Pope John Paul convoked a Synod for the Americas in 1997. That synod produced the apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in America (The Church in America), a document aimed at guiding the Church in North and South America into the third millennium.

But according to Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz of Santiago, Chile, president of the Latin American Bishops Council (CELAM), “the common cultural background of Latin America and the new cultural trends convinced Pope John Paul that a Fifth General Conference was needed.”

The conference was convoked by John Paul and confirmed by Benedict XVI a few months after his election.

“Issues like the massive effort to legalize abortion, homosexual unions and euthanasia, to mention some of the most alarming cases, were not on the horizon of the bishops 15 years ago,” Cardinal Errázuriz explained.

“The surge of these and other cultural and moral challenges posed by a globalized world to Catholics in this region makes this meeting a must,” he added.

Aparecida will accommodate 243 participants and 15 experts selected by the Holy See and will include a delegation of U.S. bishops, headed by Spokane, Wash., Bishop William Skylstad, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In the spirit of Ecclesia in America, the U.S. bishops will for the first time have voting rights in the drafting of the final document.

The “working document” released by the Latin American bishops in preparation for Aparecida notes a wide range of pastoral concerns, from the growth of all types of sects to the threats against life and family and the never-ending problem of poverty in the region.

But according to Pedro Morandé, a sociologist from the Catholic University of Chile and one of the experts Pope Benedict appointed for Aparecida, “At the bottom of all these challenges is the growing divorce between the deep Catholic identity of our people and the increasing process of secularization.”

In early March, some 50 cardinals, bishops, Catholic intellectuals, businessmen and politicians discussed the challenges to the Church in the region at a meeting in Lima.

The event, sponsored by the Institute Vida y Espiritualidad, concluded that one of the main topics that needs to be addressed in Aparecida is the challenge of not merely keeping but increasing the region’s Catholic identity.

“For many years, Catholics in Latin America assumed their neighbors were Catholic too, so they felt that the task of evangelizing was not theirs,” Cardinal Errázuriz said. “Not any more. Latin America is not sociologically Catholic anymore, and now it demands the active involvement of Catholics to announce the Gospel to their neighbors and to bring it to the public square.”

According to the cardinal, this goal was the reason why Benedict chose the theme for Aparecida: “Disciples and missionaries in Christ, so that our people may have life in him.”

Said Cardinal Errázuriz, “The theme makes very clear that the Holy Father wants Catholics to renew their identity in Christ, and from that renewal, spark a new evangelization to transform culture and society.”

Internal Challenge

Catholic identity throughout Latin America has been challenged not only by the increasing process of secularization but also from within the Church.

In fact, despite the fact that the influence of liberation theology has been winding down in the region, the group Amerindia, which loosely links liberation theologians across Latin America, recently issued a statement entitled “Proposals to Aparecida.” Among its drafters was the Jesuit Father Jon Sobrino, the Spanish theologian whose liberation theology-influenced writings were recently censured by the Vatican.

Amerindia proposes expansion of liberation theology to a “theology of the excluded,” meaning “not only the poor, but others excluded, like women, African-Americans, indigenous people and sexual minorities.”

The liberation theologians also propose a pastoral project that demands married priests as a “response” to “indigenous traditions,” a female diaconate and a “less harsh position on abortion” in recognition of “women’s rights.” The group also supports homosexual “unions” as a “gesture to the oppressed sexual minorities.”

“Their proposals have no chance of making it into the document,” said Fernando Moreno, a Catholic philosopher and analyst from the Chilean Catholic Gabriela Mistral University.

“But because of their capacity to lobby — especially in Brazil, where Amerindia has a significant presence — they can provoke a stalemate that will prevent the general conference from moving the Catholic Church beyond the theological debates that consumed so much of our energy in the past.”

“That’s why all eyes are on the Holy Father,” Moreno said, recalling that in Puebla in 1989, John Paul delivered an opening speech that became the cornerstone of the final document.

Concluded Moreno, “I am confident that Pope Benedict will have a similar decisive impact on defining what comes out Aparecida.”

Alejandro Bermúdez

is based in Lima, Peru.