Excerpt from WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/behind-the-feud-behind-trump-and-leo-xiv-5d28d774?mod=hp_opin_pos_6
The Catholic Church faces grave challenges in Latin America. A wave of conversions to Protestantism and a surge of defections to secularism have weakened the church’s once-ironclad hold. In the 1960s, at least 90% of Latin America’s population identified as Catholic. Today, Catholicism risks losing its status as the majority religion in Brazil, and the church is ceding ground across the whole region.
In diagnosing the problem, the wing of Latin Catholicism that both Francis and Leo represent saw the church’s historical links with elite power structures and oligarchical families as a key vulnerability. This wing sees creating a “church of and for the poor” as an ethical imperative as well as a way to keep the church relevant. To that end, both within and beyond the movement known as Liberation Theology, many Latin Catholics promote visions of solidarity, inclusion, anticolonialism and anticapitalism to increase the church’s appeal across Latin America.
This vision does not, to put it mildly, mesh well with Mr. Trump’s MAGA worldview. The administration’s agenda of restoring Washington’s dominance in the Western Hemisphere rubs most Latin Americans the wrong way and intensifies anticolonial and anticapitalist sentiment.
The differences go deeper than politics. The conservative wing of North American and European Catholicism that has been the most hostile to the papacies of Francis and Leo is tied to the old elite-linked Catholicism of Latin America and Latin Europe. Nostalgia for the Latin Mass and the pomp and paraphernalia, doctrinal and otherwise, of traditional Tridentine Catholicism is connected sociologically and politically to the chief opponents of the left-coded Catholicism now dominant across Latin America. The “postliberal” Catholicism that has electrified a new generation of right-leaning American converts, many of them supporters of Vice President JD Vance, emerges from the kind of Catholicism that men like Francis and Leo have fought all their lives.
Making matters worse, the Trump administration’s Protestant supporters are closely aligned with the Pentecostal and evangelical movements that shredded Catholicism’s near-monopoly of Latin American religion. The megachurch pastors and “prosperity gospel” preachers blessing and anointing Mr. Trump are the North American counterparts of the preachers now challenging Rome’s hold farther south.
History will likely view the papacies of Francis and Leo as a transitional era for a Catholic Church slowly adjusting to a world in which the church’s future lies increasingly in the Global South. Both men have helped bridge the gap between South and North and have offered a theological and sociological approach that represents Southern concerns in a less abrasive way than, for example, African Catholicism might.
African Catholicism, with its embrace of tough stances against homosexuality and in favor of traditional sex roles, fits less easily with the predominant ethos of many European and American Catholics. An “inclusive” Latin view of Muslim migrants that sees them as marginalized people who need to be integrated sits more easily with enlightened Western opinion than the more confrontational African view.
The coalition between a European Catholicism in eclipse and a Latin Catholicism in decline may not endure for all time, but it’s difficult to envision a practical alternative for today. Latin America is the region with the largest Catholic population, while the bulk of the church’s funding comes from North America and Europe.
That may change. Africa’s exploding Catholic population is expected to surpass Latin America’s by the 2050s, and the importance of European and American funding may decline over time.
