John Paul cries 'wolf:' misreading the Pentecostals

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1992 by Edward L. Cleary

As with many of his trips, John Paul II's visit to the Dominican Republic in October carried symbolic significance. Could he avoid giving tacit approval to the extravagance of President Joaquin Balaguer's monument to Columbus's discovery of the Americas? Would he ask for pardon for the colonial excesses that brought devastation to native peoples? These questions were pushed aside in the minds of many observers by the pope's pointed attack on sects and other religions.

In his opening address at the Fourth General Conference of Latin American Bishops (CELAM), the pope said the sects were like "rapacious wolves" devouring Latin American Catholics and "causing division and discord in our communities." This was a key point in a speech meant to give direction to the Latin American church for the coming decade.

Many Latin American bishops were prepared for the pope's strong language about "sects" and "pseudo-spiritual movements" by similar language that had appeared in the assembly's working document. John Paul II also stressed the danger of underestimating "a certain strategy" employing notable economic resources to crack the Catholic unity of Latin America and weaken the bonds that unify Latin American countries. This line of reasoning also frequently appears in interviews with Latin American bishops: first, Latin Americans have a Catholic soul and a Catholic culture that bind therm together; and second, some groups are spending a lot of money to attack the Catholic church in Latin America and the United States is surely behind it. Archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas of San Salvador remarked to a reporter in El Salvador that the sects were the pay-back from the United States for progressive stands the church has taken.

But ten years of study has convinced me that there is not a strong relation between money spent and results. The great advances seen in Protestant growth in Latin America are not the result of dollars from the United States. Everett Wilson, a Pentecostal scholar with a doctorate in history from Stanford University, has been looking for a long time into charges of a North American offensive against the Catholic church. He concludes that, yes, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in a North American religious push into Latin America. But he concludes that this effort has borne little fruit for large growth is not typically seen in these recently arriving groups.

If great growth is not among these groups, where then? The use of the term, "sectas," is itself objectionable to most evangelicals and is usually avoided by close observers of the complex non-Catholic religious world of Latin America. In particular it tends to perpetuate typical Catholic stereotypes and prejudices about non-Catholics. Sectas also forces global generalizations on non-catholics, characterizations that do not fit everyone. To explain the word's usage, Professor Samuel Escobar, a scholar at Eastern Baptist Seminary, Overbrook, Pennsylvania, believes Catholic bishops use it to point to the fastest growing groups. Thus sectas mixes together Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons with a wide assortment of evangelical Christians, "brainwashing" cults, and New Age groups.

In fact, the greatest growth among non-Catholics in Latin America is by Pentecostals, especially indigenous groups. These differing and fragmented groups account for 75 to 90 percent of growth in non-Catholic religions in many Latin American countries. Latin American Catholics typically see Pentecostals as among the new groups, cultural imports without deep roots. But many Pentecostal Christians have long roots in Latin America, dating back to the early 1900s in Chile and Brazil, and the 1920s in other Latin American countries where they are prominent. Older Protestant groups in Latin America, Lutherans, Methodists, and Anglicans, have also tended to ignore Pentecostal history, feel rebuffed in attempts at interchurch relations with Pentecostal churches, and like Catholics have lost many members to them. The five Protestant observers at CELAM IV were all members of historical Protestant denominations and, thus, the question of why no Pentecostal observer was invited to the meeting becomes more insistent, especially when Pentecostals practiced in ecumenism were available.

Since the greatest Pentecostal growth has occurred in the last twenty years, historians and social scientists, looking more carefully into the backgrounds of these churches, are surprised by their long histories. Pentecostals had been living in different worlds, apart from mainline Protestants and Catholics. Finally, in the 1970s and '80s, several things occurred to make the Pentecostal presence felt: their numbers reached a critical mass that could not be ignored; Jimmy Swaggart (a Pentecostal) captivated large audiences on television and in soccer stadia which held 150,000 rapt attenders; many Catholics became Charismatics, cousins to Pentecostals; and previously "apolitical" Pentecostals went into public life.