Stretching from Mexico to Argentina (including the Carribean), CELAM (the Continental Episcopal Conference for Latin America) was established by Pope Pius XII. It met for the first time in Rio de Janeiro in 1955.
CELAM represents more than half the global Catholic population.
In 2007, a plenary meeting of CELAM was called at Aparecida to establish a plan for the evangelization of Latin America. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was the principal author of the conference’s final document. Within one year, he would be elected Pope.
CELAM’s strategy to evangelize Latin America would become the script for Pope Francis to revitalize the mission of the Universal Church.
Within weeks of his election, Pope Francis announced that a Council of Cardinals was to serve as his principal advisory board. Members included Cardinal Errazuriz and Cardinal Maradiaga, who served on the Aparecida drafting committee as well.
The Aparecida strategy was to serve as the model of evangelization for the entire Church.
Pope Francis even enshrined its central message in Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, which called for the Church to redirect its missionary discipleship, serving as a “field hospital” for the spiritually and emotionally wounded of the world.
Now, in the fifth year of his Pontificate, the condition of the Church in Latin America is in a state of catastrophe and crisis.
Scandals have accelerated the decline of Catholicism throughout the Latin American world, but no more dramatically than in Chile.
The share of Chileans expressing confidence in the church has collapsed from 80% in 1996 to 34% in 2017, a decline four times as large as the Latin American average during that period.
And for the first time, Chile ranks first among the dioceses of CELAM in the proportion of respondents indicating that they do not profess any faith at all.
The role of Cardinal Errázuriz brought Pope Francis’s mishandling of Chile into his inner circle.
Meanwhile, media reports of an alleged scandal in Cardinal Maradiaga’s diocese has meant that neither of the Latin Americans on the Council of Cardinals has been a force advancing the Holy Father’s pastoral priorities. To the contrary, they have become a serious and embarrassing distraction.
Recent attempts to liberalize abortion laws in both Chile and Argentina bring to the attention of the Church issues that Pope Francis has repeatedly stated he would prefer the Church “not to be obsessed about.”
Elsewhere, the Church in Latin America is in a state of siege.
Venezuela is the most cruel reality, with the population starved by its own government, but just this year the Bishops in Honduras, Nicaragua and Ecuador have all been seized by the necessity of dealing with political crises.
The Mexican bishops, for their part, are attempting to deal with continuing lethal violence against their Priests, even as they continue to cozy up to successive corrupt governments.
The grand hope that the Aparecida strategy could serve as the model of evangelization for the world has vanished.
The Church represented by CELAM is in a state of total collapse and with it more than half the total population of the Universal Church.
What confronts the Holy Father as he turns his gaze upon his native culture and heritage is a Church beset by scandal, irrelevant on life issues, disrupted by political strife, and unable to provide adequate spiritual and sacramental care for the faithful due to an abismal lack of Priests.
The Aparecida strategy is dead. It appears there is nothing to take its place.
Who could have imagined?
No comments:
Post a Comment