by John L. Allen Jr.
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Hill City, Kansas
After recent travels in Africa and Central America, I’ve come to two conclusions about Catholicism in the global south as opposed to the north.
First, low Mass attendance rates in the north are generally an index of secularism. That is, they indicate Catholic populations for whom religious practice is not a terribly high priority. In the south, on the other hand, they’re usually a measure of the priest shortage. They point to populations that don’t have regular access to a priest, or who never became accustomed to Mass attendance because there was no priest in the area where they lived. For such groups, Catholicism has traditionally been a matter of baptisms, weddings and funerals, along with private devotions and family customs.
Secularization, at least in the northern sense, is basically non-existent across most of the global south. International values surveys regularly indicate that more than 90 percent of the population in the south regards religion as an important force in their lives. Belief in God, in the afterlife, in spirits and demons, in miracles and the power of prayer, is near-universal. Hence when Catholics don’t go to Mass, it’s not because they don’t believe.
That brings us to my second conclusion. In the north, when Catholics become frustrated with the church, they usually just drop out, drifting into non-practice. In the south, when Catholics become frustrated, they often become Pentecostals.
Both conclusions were clearly in evidence during my stay last week in Honduras, a Central American nation of seven million, which for more than five hundred years was overwhelmingly, if often nominally, Catholic. Today, however, estimates are that the country is at least 35 percent Protestant, with the lion’s share of that number being Pentecostal. Both Protestant and Catholic leaders say it would not be surprising if the country ended up evenly divided, 50-50, between Catholics and Protestants.
In much of the developing world, hard numbers are almost impossible to establish, even with basic things like tax collections and census counts. Most Catholics in Honduras, however, say that Mass attendance rates across the country are quite low – some put it as low as 5 percent, others as high as 30. What most observers believe, however, is that where a parish has a dynamic resident priest, attendance rates skyrocket. Since there are just over 400 priests in the entire country, however, most Catholics do not live in such a parish, especially outside the urban centers, and hence don’t have ready access to Mass.
Given that reality, Hondurans say, it’s no surprise that many nominal Catholics who feel underserved or forgotten respond positively to the close personal attention that Protestant groups are able to shower upon them. One Honduran woman, for example, told me a story about her sister-in-law who had been hospitalized with a form of cancer. She did not belong to a parish that had a resident priest, and the overworked hospital chaplain was only able to see her briefly and episodically. Meanwhile, a local Pentecostal community had members in her room every day, comforting her, bringing her flowers, and seeing to the needs of her family while she was away. It’s no mystery, this Honduran woman told me, why her sister-in-law considered joining that Pentecostal church. In the end, the family persuaded her to remain Catholic, but that’s not how these things often turn out.
These two realities help set the scene for the upcoming fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin American and the Caribbean (CELAM) in Aparecida, Brazil, in early May. Despite an uptick in vocations to the priesthood in some parts of Latin America (Honduras, for example, currently has 170 seminarians, an all-time high), realistically the numbers of new priests will not be adequate to deliver intensely personal pastoral care to almost 500 million Catholics. Hence the bishops will face pressure to embrace a new model, one which sees laity as the primary agents of many kinds of pastoral care – visits to the sick, youth ministry, leaders of faith formation programs and catechesis, and even as administrators of church institutions at parish, diocesan, national and international levels.
In the north, movement towards “lay ministry” has sometimes been complicated by perceptions that underlying such proposals is an ideological agenda to “deconstruct” the priesthood, or to subvert the hierarchical structures of the church. For that reason, the strong push for assertion of Catholic identity in the north has sometimes worked at cross-purposes with calls for lay empowerment.
In the south, however, this ideological subtext is largely absent. Instead, what looms largest is the simple pastoral reality of a priest shortage which renders large segments of the Catholic population inert, coupled with aggressive lay activism from “competitors,” especially Pentecostals. In that light, some observers expect the CELAM meeting to embrace a strong call for lay ministry – not as a critique of clericalism, but as a practical necessity.
Given the irrepressible religiosity of the south, most people want to be part of a faith community. The question is which one – and if the Catholic church continues to depend largely on priests as near-exclusive providers of pastoral care, experts say, in many places it’s steadily less likely to be Roman Catholicism.
