Sixth Question (from RAI Television, Italy):
In your book Jesus of Nazareth, you referred to a dramatic crisis of faith. In Latin America, maybe what we see is not so much a crisis of faith as a landslide. Liberation theology was substituted by the theology of the Protestant sects, which promise a paradise of faith at a good price. The Catholic Church is losing faithful. How can the church stem this tide, this hemorrhage of Catholic faithful?
Pope Benedict XVI:
This is our common concern precisely in this fifth General Conference of CELAM. We want to find convincing responses. This success of the sects shows, in the first place, that there’s a thirst for God, a thirst for religion. People want to be close to God, and they seek his closeness. Naturally, they also hope for and expect solutions to their daily problems of life. We from the Catholic Church have to accept the responsibility in this fifth general conference of making the church more missionary, more dynamic in offering responses to the thirst for God. We have to be aware that all people, and especially the poor, want to have God close to them. We also must be aware that together with this response to the thirst for God, we also have to help people find the conditions for a just life, both micro-economically, in very concrete situations as they sects do, as well as macro-economically, thinking about all the exigencies of justice.
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Eleventh Question (from Brazil):
Many Brazilians don’t necessarily want to hear the message of the church. What can you do about that? (The question was asked in Portuguese)
Pope Benedict XVI:
This is not a specific problem of Brazil. In every part of the world, there are lots of people who don’t want to listen. We hope that at least, they hear, so that if they hear, they will also be able to respond. We also seek to convince those who don’t necessarily want to hear us. Naturally, even Our Lord wasn’t able to succeed in getting everyone to listen. We don’t expect that in any given moment we’ll be able to persuade everyone. But, I’ll try, with the help of my collaborators, to speak to Brazil in this moment with the hope that many people want to listen, and that many can be convinced that this is the path to take. Of course, I’ll leave open, at the level of detail, the possibility for many different options and different opinions.
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