ARGENTINA
The Independent (UK)
David Usborne , Ed Stocker
Buenos Aires
Sunday 17 March 2013
When Jorge Bergoglio is formally installed as Pope Francis at the Vatican on Tuesday, thousands of his fellow Argentines will have risen before dawn to watch the ceremony on giant television screens installed around this city’s most famous national monument, the obelisk in the Plaza de la Republica. Well hundreds, anyway.
The choice of Cardinal Bergoglio may be an acknowledgement that Latin America is home to 40 per cent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Yet even here the church is not as hearty as it might look. Secularism is on the rise but something else has been luring customers away: the Pentecostals who are as boisterous in worship as the Catholics are demure.
Nowhere has the Pentecostal movement, a form of evangelical Protestantism, grown faster than in Brazil, notably among the poor. Visit the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, and the ramshackle churches holding daily services with charismatic sermons and stirring song are usually Pentecostal. In 1970, 92 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as Catholic. In the latest national census in 2010, the figure had dropped to 65 per cent.
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