Church faces shaky future in Latin America

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict on Wednesday starts his first trip to Latin America, where a Church that is home to nearly half of the world's Catholics faces an uncertain future and falling numbers.

The May 9-14 trip to Brazil, the most populous Catholic country, will also be a personal challenge to the Pope, who is still associated with crackdowns on Liberation Theology in the 1980s when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

The trip's main purpose is to make a keynote address in the city of Aparecida to open a major conference of Latin American bishops, who will discuss strategy for the Church.

As the Latin American Church looks at its future, one main question will be why it is losing tens of millions of members to protestant sects such as Evangelicals and Pentecostalists.

"The sects continue to spread in Latin America," said Professor Guzman Carriquiry, undersecretary at the Pontifical Council for Lay People and one of the few non-clerics in the Vatican to hold a senior position.

"We have already lost 30-40 million members to them. We have to ask ourselves questions about how we are announcing the gospel, how we are teaching, why are people looking for something different?" he told Reuters in an interview.

A study in the 1990s showed that as many as 8,000 Roman Catholics were leaving the Church in Latin America every day to join sects they see as more charismatic and which give them more personal attention than the highly structured Catholic Church.

"This erosion calls for a radical re-thinking of how the faith is being transmitted and received today in Latin America," said Carriquiry, who is Uruguayan.