Up to a million faithful are expected to throng a São Paulo park as Pope Benedict XVI celebrates a mass to canonise Brazil’s first saint, a Franciscan monk still credited with miracle cures nearly 200 years after his death.
The Catholic Church hopes that elevating Antonio de Sant’Ana Galvao to sainthood will help reverse major inroads that evangelical faiths have made not only in Brazil, but also across Latin America, which is home to almost half the world’s population of 1,1-billion Catholics.
A giant wooden cross dominates the venue for the open-air Mass, the Campo de Marte, where Benedict’s predecessor John Paul II beatified a 16th-century Canarian Jesuit missionary to Brazil, Jose de Anchieta, in 1980.
The canonisation Mass follows close on the heels of a rally late on Thursday attended by tens of thousands of Latin-American young people at a São Paulo football stadium where Benedict urged them to ”be apostles of youth”.
”I send you out … on the great mission of evangelising young men and women who have gone astray in this world like sheep without a shepherd,” the German pontiff said, urging youths to draw their inspiration from ”universal moral values”.
The former head of the Vatican’s top doctrinal body as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger reiterated his strict line against abortion and euthanasia with his frequent phrase, ”promote life from its beginning to its natural end”.
Benedict (80) also urged young people to respect marriage and practise chastity. ”Inside and outside marriage, chastity should be made a bulwark.”
The speech — coupled with a debate over abortion after Benedict and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva traded public comments on the sensitive subject — prompted a cartoon in a São Paulo newspaper on Friday showing a dour-looking pope carrying a staff with a hammer at the top instead of a crucifix.
Homosexuals and pro-choice Catholic women are staging scattered protests in major Brazilian cities against the pope during his five-day visit, blasting the Vatican for influencing government social policies.
The Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transvestites and Transsexuals published an open letter on Wednesday saying that religious convictions ”cannot influence government policies, much less be used to discriminate”.
Miracle man
The Franciscan monk to be sainted at Friday’s Mass lived from 1739 to 1822, founding monasteries and convents throughout Brazil.
Friar Galvao is best known today because of his reputed healing powers. A first miracle attributed to him and recognised by the church occurred at the start of the 19th century when a patient was cured of kidney stones after he had her swallow three small pieces of paper on which he had written prayers for divine intercession.
Beatification is the step before sainthood, which requires at least two miracles attributed to the candidate.
Two much more recent miracles attributed to Galvao have been recognised by the Vatican. In 1990, a four-year-old girl recovered from what was considered incurable hepatitis, and in 1999 a mother and child survived a high-risk birth in what the Vatican called a ”scientifically inexplicable” case.
Both had swallowed the celebrated paper ”miracle pills” that have led, according to São Paulo’s Monastery of Light, to 8 057 cases in which supplicants’ prayers to Galvao have been answered since the priest was beatified by John Paul II in 1998.
Later in the day, the pope will meet about 430 Brazilian bishops in São Paulo’s Cathedral da Se, after which he will travel to nearby Aparecida to open a conference of Latin-American bishops on Sunday, the final day of his trip. That meeting will be aimed at giving impetus to the missionary reach of the church in the region.
Latin America is home to nearly half of the world’s 1,1-billion Catholics, with Brazil the largest stronghold with 155 000. But in recent years the church has lost ground to rival evangelical faiths, as well as to a growing number of people who have abandoned religion altogether.
In Brazil, 64% of the population is Catholic, but the figure has fallen from 74% a decade ago, according to a recent study. At the same time, the number of evangelical followers has risen to 17% from 11%, the Datafolha institute said. — Sapa-AFP