Pope Summons Latin American Bishops to Stem Church's Decline

Ending a five-day trip to the church's biggest stronghold on the planet, Benedict also warned that legalized contraception and abortion in Latin America threaten "the future of the peoples" and said the historic Catholic identity of the region is under assault.

Like his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, Benedict sought to carve out a space for the church to pronounce on social policy that keeps its distance from both capitalism and the Marxist influence popular among some grassroots Catholic activists, remnants of the Liberation theology movement he moved to crush when he was a cardinal.

"The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit," Benedict said as he opened a two-week bishops' conference aimed at re-energizing the church's influence in Latin America.

But he added that unfettered capitalism and globalization, blamed by many in the region for the deep divide between the rich and poor, gives "rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness."

Benedict, speaking in Spanish and Portuguese to the bishops in Brazil's holiest shrine city, also said Latin America needs more dedicated Catholics in leadership positions in the media and at universities throughout the region.

"This being a continent of baptized Christians, it is time to overcome the notable absence — in the political sphere, in the world of the media and in the universities — of the voices and initiatives of Catholic leaders with strong personalities and generous dedication, who are coherent in their ethical and religious convictions," Benedict said.

He said the church's leaders must halt a trend that has seen millions of Catholics turn into born-again Protestants or simply stop going to church.

"It is true that one can detect a certain weakening of Christian life in society overall," Benedict told 200 bishops and archbishops and 20 cardinals. "And of participation in the life of the Catholic Church, due to secularism, hedonism, indifferentism and proselytism by numerous sects, animist religions and new pseudo-religious phenomena."

In Aparecida and in major events earlier this week in Sao Paulo that attracted more than 1 million people, Benedict roundly denounced immorality in a bid to counter the a rising tide of Latin Americans flouting the church's prohibition on premarital sex and divorce.

Now, he said, the bishops must convince Catholics from all walks of life "to bring the light of the Gospel into public life, into culture, economics and politics."