BRAZIL
PolicyMic
Jake Horowitz
1) He is from Brazil.
Scherer leads the archdiocese in Brazil, the world’s largest Catholic country with a total population of 6 million Catholics. Being from Sao Paulo, Scherer is accustomed to dealing with social problems, as this city has 11 million people and faces high poverty rates, crime, and youth unemployment. Pope Benedict XVI named Scherer as the seventh Archbishop of Sao Paulo on March 21, 2007. In October 2007, the Pope announced he would make Scherer a Cardinal.
2) He is considered to be a moderate.
Scherer is considered to be theologically moderate. He is considered to be conservative within Brazil, but holds more centrist political views than Pope Benedict XVI, who opposed “liberation theology” in the Church in Latin America in the 1980s. Liberation theology is a leftwing movement which believe the Church should ally itself with the poor politically. Benedict called this theology “a singular heresy” but Scherer has been more moderate. He backed its focus on social injustice and poverty, even though he criticized it for using “Marxism as a tool of analysis.”
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