John Paul cries 'wolf:' misreading the Pentecostals.

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.

One of the great figures of Latin American Pentecostalism arrived in Latin America in 1889. Willis C. Hoover served the Methodist Episcopal church in Chile. Pentecostal experiences for Hoover and his followers occurred in 1907, only six years after the beginning of the worldwide Pentecostal movement by Charles Parham in Kansas. The experience of Hoover and his followers led to a split with the Methodist church and to the founding of the Pentecostal Methodist church in Chile. This is a Chilean foundation, dates from 1909, has had Chilean leaders for decades, and is the largest non-Catholic church in the country, with hundreds of thousands of members.

Brazil, with about 20 percent evangelicals in a population of 120 million, has also been a major center of Pentecostal growth. The Brazilian Assemblies of God has attracted millions and is the largest evangelical denomination in the country. The manner by which this church began was unusually international but quickly became Brazilian. Swedish Baptists heard of Pentecostalism in Chicago and began work in Northeast Brazil in 1911. Daniel Berg and Gunnar Vingren, founders, wished to adapt the work of the church to Brazil, recruited Brazilian pastors and teachers, and left behind them a church that never had to shed a North American image.

The depiction of sects also obscures the formal Catholic-Pentecostal dialogue that has been taking place. Since 1972, the Vatican Secretariat for Christian Unity has sponsored a series of five-year consultations with what are called Classical Pentecostals. Kilian McDonnell, a Benedictine theologian at Saint John's, Collegeville, Minnesota, has been co-chairman of the dialogue and has been encouraged by its progress.

Peter Hocken, a Catholic priest who is secretary of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, believes that the Pentecostal movement offers a model which differs from the dominant one in the ecumenical movement between Reformation churches and Catholic participants. Pentecostals have their origins after the Reformation and are part of the Holiness tradition. Hocken says that the dialogue between Catholics and Pentecostals springs especially from personal and spiritual renewal and sharing in worship and ministry. This requires of theology an interaction between theological sources and contemporary reality: a reflection on Scripture and tradition in the current situation and a reflection on the current situation in the light of Scripture and tradition. This, Hocken characterizes as a servant theology. Such theology resembles what the Latin American church does through its methodology of description of reality, reflection on Scripture and tradition, and pastoral conclusions. The main thrust of ecumenism in Latin America and its charisma for the larger church will probably not be Reformed-Catholic or Orthodox-Catholic but Spirit-oriented between Latin American Catholics and Pentecostals.

Even to counter the aggressive anti-Catholicism among Pentecostals, belligerent language may do more harm than good. McDonnell believes it closes off the possibility of Catholics learning, even from exclusionary Pentecostals. "They are better at new evangelization - ultimate challenge, decision, and conversion - than we are." In terms of the main theme of the Latin American church at Santo Domingo, evangelization, making Christ better known and followed with conviction, Pentecostals have a great lesson to teach. But no one in or around the Santo Domingo meeting cited Pentecostal vision or methods for illumination about what to do concretely in evangelization.

Why? "Since the public image of Pentecostals is not good in many Latin American circles, they can be ignored," says McDonnell. Melinda Roper, former president of the Maryknoll Sisters, observes: "In contrast to my growing up as the only Catholic among Protestants, the Latin American bishops grew up only with Catholics. To have non-Catholics around in abundant numbers is a new experience, with nothing in their background to help them deal with it. To them it does seem like violence and calls forth an instinctual need to defend."

It must be admitted that that cause has been given many times over for the strong language of the pope and the bishops. To anyone who has tried to put out of his or her house insistent visitors with religious dogmas thrown around as endless slogans, the invasion of aggressive church bodies does seem un-Latin American. But the irritation felt by many Latin American Catholics has deeper cause than importunate visitors. Many sectarian evangelicals preach an exclusionary Christianity: Catholics will not be saved; Catholics have dead faith; Catholics are the Whore of Babylon. One becomes Christian in the measure than one stops being Catholic.

The appeal of Pentecostalism can be explained in part by sociological views of the situation of many Latin Americans since World War Il when massive migrations and changes in work produced "masterless" persons, men and women who had been cut loose from previous ties to families, friends, and neighborhoods and were free to form new bonds, including new religious ties. Pentecostals were there in the new neighborhoods, welcoming them, challenging previous ways of consumption (drinking, womanizing, not saving money), offering new status as persons with many roles to play in the church. And Pentecostals offered an attractive spirituality. In his address, John Paul II also offered an analysis of causes, centering on the religious ignorance of great masses of Catholics who lack pastoral attention. But he also raised a delicate issue: "But it can also happen that the faithful do not find in their pastoral ministers the strong sense of God which they should transmit by their own lives. And so many poor and simple go to the sects seeking a religious sense for life."

Note should also be taken that vigorous countermeasures by Catholics are having an effect. James Scanlon, a Maryknoll missioner in Guatemala City, recruited 200 lay people to knock on the doors of their neighborhood and developed other programs designed to bring back Catholics to regular attendance at the parish. In 1989 he welcomed back a thousand people. David Stoll, author of Is Latin America Turning Protestant? (University of California Press, 1990; see John A. Coleman's review in Commonweal, January 25, 1991), reported recently that in the area of his field study in the Ixil region of Guatemala three priests were drawing large crowds to Catholic churches. These and many other efforts have slowed evangelical and Pentecostal growth considerably in Central America, according to Clifton Holland who with his teams of researchers has been surveying the region for church growth or decline.

Catholics in the United States, given their experience of interactions with non-Catholics, could be bridges in a dialogue between Latin American Catholics and Pentecostals. Here Pentecostals are now the subject of serious scholarship, for example Robert Mapes Anderson's Vision of the Disinherited (Oxford University Press, 1979). An atmosphere of trust pervades the Society of Pentecostal Scholars and the ecumenical dialogue involving Catholics and Classical Pentecostals.

Few Latin American Catholics know the history of Pentecostalism, the national character of its churches, or the dialogue taking place between Catholics and Pentecostals. If there is one place in the world where greater understanding between Catholics and Pentecostals would benefit the work of God it is Latin America.

Edward L. Cleary, O.P., is a visiting professor at Yale University, and coauthor of Conflict and Competition: The Latin American Church in a Changing Environment (Lynne Rienner).