The Eucharist and the aggressive spiritualism of the sects

And one must also ask: why do so many leave the Church? According to me in today’s society there are sociological tendencies and phenomena like individualism, the presumption of constructing a do-it-yourself salvation, emotionalism, that produced and also feed on the religious level an ever shifting free market

Interview with Cardinal Geraldo Majella Agnelo by Stefania Falasca

Geraldo Majella Agnelo, Archbishop of São Salvador da Bahia

Geraldo Majella Agnelo, Archbishop of São Salvador da Bahia and cardinal primate of Brazil, is not the kind to dramatize. He uses subdued tones, and even towards the alarming phenomena affecting the Church in the country that has more Catholics than any other in the world he doesn’t go in for resounding alarms and isn’t expecting magical or spectacular solutions. For him, even the “de-catholicization” of the country, that winter for the Catholic Church that his precursor Lucas Moreira Neves saw beginning with the spring of the Brazilian sects, is to be faced with the ordinary tools of pastoral practice. Every day and Sunday.

Your Eminence, what was the purpose of this Synod on the Eucharist?
GERALDO MAJELLA AGNELO: Our identity lies in the Eucharist. We live on this, on this presence of Christ in our life, that constitutes the source of our faith and of our certain hope. And the Eucharist puts our life on earth in relation with the eternal life, reminding us also of the fact that we aren’t in this world for ever. The possibility of enjoying this gift is, however, subject to certain conditions. And that leads to some problems, when for example there are insufficient number of priests to celebrate the Eucharistic liturgy for all the communities. And then there are the cases of those who, for different reasons, can’t approach the sacrament.
Both these problems mark the life of the Church in Brazil. Are you satisfied with the answers to them that emerged from the Synod?
AGNELO: One couldn’t say that these questions were really gone in to. For example, concerning the shortage of priests, one can’t propose to remedy it only by a more balanced redistribution among the different areas, taking priests from one place and transferring them to another. Priests are also linked to the communities and to the local churches, there where their vocations blossom. Then there are the missionaries, those that have identified themselves with the Church to which they are sent, and they are certainly essential. Instead, according to me, there’s little to be gained by sending priests to work for short periods in communities far from that of their origins. Often it doesn’t give lasting fruit.
“Irregular” unions are a mass phenomenon in Brazil. And the Synod also touched on the theme of the admission of remarried divorcees to the community.
AGNELO: There, too, it’s not a matter of “lowering” the conditions that make it permissible to approach the sacraments. If it becomes normal to abandon one’s spouse, it means that often people marry in church without perceiving the ceremony as a sacrament.
At the Synod, Cardinal Hummes said that the percent in Brazil of those who declare themselves Catholic has dropped from 83 to 67 percent in ten years. And the ministers of the charismatic and pentecostal sects are by now double the number of Catholic priests. How do you judge these figures?
AGNELO: It’s not a phenomenon that’s just arisen. And one must also ask: why do so many leave the Church? According to me in today’s society there are sociological tendencies and phenomena like individualism, the presumption of constructing a do-it-yourself salvation, emotionalism, that produced and also feed on the religious level an ever shifting free market. People flutter from one sect to another, and in this constant shifting there is also the phenomenon of a return to Catholicism.
An old theory attributed the responsibility to liberation theology, that in the past decades was accused of focussing attention on political problems at the expense of the supernatural.
AGNELO: But the mysteries of the Christian faith, like the mystery of the Eucharist, have nothing to do with the aggressive spiritualism of sectarian groups. The religious feeling of people in Latin America is a positive factor. In the years of liberation theology, that religious feeling also nourished expectations of answers to real problems of poverty and injustice. The great temptation of that time was of imposing ideology as if it were the answer to such expectations. Now, with the sects, it’s the same in certain aspects. All that’s changed is the ideology, it’s gone on to a pragmatist ideology linked to other imported politico-cultural models. But the mechanism is the same.
Are you saying that the phenomenon of the sects is above all political?
AGNELO: The political element blends with the promises of success in life that attract the new followers, and with the availability of means that the sects show they have at their disposition. They say: if you come with us, we’ll resolve the problems, we’ll eliminate suffering and poverty, we’ll guarantee your success. With an appeal to miracles and also with an outpouring of material resources, with which we can’t compete. On the other hand, one also has to acknowledge that the sects know how to receive people. Among us, once upon a time, those about to become priests received among the four minor orders that of doorkeeper. The doorkeeper was the porter, the person whose task it was to safeguard the door of the church and welcome the faithful. Maybe that traditional function should be taken up again and given more importance in the training of priests.