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Brisbane – November 22, 2009. Apostolic News. According to the Catholic newspaper, The Catholic Leader, Pentecostals have become a threat to the continual survival of the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America. They are now seeking for a dialogue with Pentecostals. What would their dialogue accomplish? “Dialogue” most of the time is where compromise comes into play.
The following article is from the Catholic Leader concerning this sought after dialogue with Pentecostals.
Building Bridges towards Unity
THE fact Pentecostals now form the second largest Christian community after Catholics is cause for considerable soul searching among Church leaders.
Exact numbers of followers are not clear but estimates range from 345 million to more than 600 million.
What is clear is that these numbers are growing rapidly, particularly in Latin America, Asia and Africa, often at the expense of mainstream Christian Churches.
Monsignor Juan Usma Gomez, as a representative of the Vatican’s Curia has been involved in dialogue with various “classical” Pentecostal groups and leaders for the past 13 years.
The monsignor in a recent conversation with The Catholic Leader said the situation offered both risk and opportunity for all parties involved.
“What we have here is two missionary models in collision – the Catholic model and the Pentecostal model,” he said.
“Both offer very different ways of carrying out mission and of being Christian.
“At the same time, given many similarities, there is also tremendous opportunity for unity between the two.”
Now bureau chief of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the monsignor made this and other comments the day before presenting a public lecture at St Leo’s College, University of Queensland, on October 30 on the topic of Catholic, Pentecostal and Evangelical dialogue.
Msgr Usma Gomez had been invited to Brisbane as keynote speaker at the national conference of Diocesan Commissions for Ecumenism and Inter-religious Relations sponsored by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.
The monsignor while in Brisbane also attended ecumenical celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Lutheran World Federation and the Roman Catholic Church on October 31, 1999.
His previous role as a priest in Columbia had made him very aware of the inroads of Pentecostalism into Catholicism which has been such a feature of religious life in Latin America in the past two decades.
Statistics on religious allegiance tell the story. For example, in 1980, 89 per cent of the Brazilian population called itself Catholic; in the 2000 census, the figure fell to 74 per cent, and by 2007, when Pope Benedict XVI visited the country, it stood at 64 per cent.
Pentecostals now constitute about 20 million of Brazil’s 175 million population. In a 2007 Pew Forum Survey on Religion and Public Life, 62 per cent of Pentecostals interviewed said they were converts and about three-in-four said they had once been Catholics.
The Catholic Leader
