From the editor’s desk

Brazil?s challenge to Benedict

Brazil presents a range of hard challenges to the leadership of Pope Benedict XVI, whose response may determine the Church's future in the world's largest Catholic nation. Indeed, whether it stays Catholic at all cannot be taken for granted. The spirit of post-modernist relativism and secularism, which has already undermined the Church's place in Europe, is only one of a number of threats, though in the long run the most serious. The rise of evangelical Pentecostalism has attracted millions of the urban poor, who like its simplicity and fervour. The ranks of the Catholic faithful, meanwhile, contain many elements that are disgruntled with the type of Catholicism the Pope's own career exemplifies - seeing threats where others see opportunities. His current visit, therefore, is an important test of his new papal style, which is to depict the Catholic faith not as a closing down but as an opening up. This is the refreshingly new note to strike, but the logical implications may reach too far for him to follow.

As elsewhere in the Church, it is in matters touching on sex and family life that many of the lay faithful in Brazil are most out of step with the Vatican. As elsewhere, a liberalising moral and social agenda pursued by a left-of-centre Government puts the Church on collision with the State on a number of these neuralgic issues, and it cannot rely on the unconditional support of millions of Catholic voters when the issues reach the ballot box.

Among the Church's internal problems is the chronic and growing shortage of clergy, which has led many even at the most senior level to talk about relaxing the rule of celibacy. If that option is closed by the conservatively minded Vatican, as it appears to be, the paradoxical result could be an impetus towards change in an even more radical direction, towards a Church based largely on the laity. It is commonplace to say in Brazil that if the country is to be re-evangelised, the laity must take the lead. But it is often the same laity which is demoralised and in danger of being alienated by its disagreements with Church policy. They are unlikely to welcome more responsibility without a proportionate increase in power and influence. If instead the Church tries to rely on the ultra-obedient new lay movements to provide the front-line troops for evangelisation, the moderate majority is likely to be further offended.

This is another example of a basic structural problem in the modern Catholic Church: ideas and insights flow downwards from the top easily enough, but move hardly at all in an upwards direction. The result is a longer and longer list of issues where the periphery has difficulty with what the centre is saying. Eventually the two perceptions of what needs to be done have little in common: the leaders have become unharnessed from the led. Contrary to his former incarnation as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Pope Benedict is acquiring a reputation as a good listener. It is not so much by what he says, but what he hears - and attends to - that his visit to Brazil may in the long term be judged. Rome does not have all of the answers. Some may even lie in Brazil.