Here is the regular link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in ... rotestant/
Take-home message for me? The Catholic Church is absolutely handicapping itself by its current structure of church leadership by outside priests. In this particular case the story is about a remote village that the regional priest can only visit once a year for one annual mass. What kind of Christianity is that? Ridiculous to think that is an actual functioning church when they only meet once a year. Unless Catholicism can actually figure out how to be present in such communities, this story will continue across the world. And probably the only way they can do that is through married priests recruited locally.
Of course Evangelicals who actually live in the community are going to beat them out when the Catholic Church doesn't even show up for 364 days out of 365.
read the whole thing.When the rains finally receded, Father Moisés Oliveira pulled his motorboat out into the swollen Purus River and pointed it downstream. Chugging down muddy waters toward the next community on his schedule, the Catholic priest felt uncertain. He’d heard all about the problems in São Miguel.
Like so many other isolated settlements scattered throughout the Amazon rainforest, São Miguel was historically Catholic. Not that long ago, when Father Moisés would make his annual journey there, his presence was a community event — the only time when the people of São Miguel could attend Mass, have their babies baptized and make confession. The squat church could never fit all the faithful.
But that was before the arrival of an evangelical Protestant pastor in early 2020, before the opening of the community’s first evangelical church, before a fever of conversions split the community and turned it against itself. Longtime friends stopped talking. Families fractured. Suspicion and rumor spread about the Devil and death. When a 12-year-old girl was found dead in 2020, hanging from her porch rafters, Catholics saw a terrible accident. But evangelicals whispered of suicide and a demon that the pastor said was stalking the community.
The priest looked across the waters and saw São Miguel up ahead, a line of shacks rising upon an escarpment. At the far end, where forest nipped at the village, was one of its newest buildings. Painted white and blue, the pastor’s evangelical church gleamed like a beacon in the day’s falling light.
Father Moisés hadn’t met the pastor, nor heard him preach, but his charisma was no secret. Evangelicals said they’d never heard anyone speak of God as he did. Thin and tanned, hands calloused from years of wielding a chain saw, the pastor looked no different from thousands of others struggling to survive along the Purus. But followers said he’d been touched by divine providence. He was rumored to have banished malevolent spirits and cured illnesses. He claimed to be illiterate but somehow read the Bible with fluency. Wherever he went, Catholics renounced their church and followed him.
The next day, Father Moisés would step up to the altar of the Catholic church and be forced to reckon with the pastor’s impact. He didn’t know how many faithful he’d find in the pews at the annual Mass or whether the community could still even be considered Catholic. He could only be sure that whatever was happening in São Miguel was not unique to it.
In his 36 years, Father Moisés had witnessed a marked retreat of Catholicism across Latin America, where evangelical Protestants were increasingly challenging its historic dominance. The collapse had been particularly swift in the priest’s own Brazil — the church’s strongest redoubt by measure of Catholic adherents. His vast, deeply Christian country, whose Catholic roots reached back to Portuguese colonization, was now being reborn evangelical.
In the roughly two decades since he entered seminary, the number of evangelical churches had tripled, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research, and now accounted for 7 out of 10 religious establishments. Nearly 180 million of his fellow Brazilians — 84 percent of the population — were baptized Catholic, Vatican statistics show. But so many had turned away from his church that soon, demographers say, if not already, Brazil would for the first time no longer be majority-Catholic.
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