No Love Affair for the Pope in Brazil

Pope Benedict XVI was always fighting an uphill battle when it came to winning the hearts and minds of the world's most Catholic continent. Two years ago, when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger walked out of the conclave as the new Roman Pontiff, the news was greeted in Brazil with a tinge of disappointment. Cardinal Claudio Hummes, then the Archbishop of Sao Paulo, was considered a frontrunner going into the conclave, and many had been saying that it was "Latin America's turn" to have the papacy, after centuries of Italians and the non-Italian European Pope John Paul II.

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Pope Benedict XVI Visits Brazil

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So perhaps it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the meeting of an 80-year-old professorial pontiff and the often exuberant Brazilian flock was not an around-the-clock love affair. For starters, there wasn't the massive turnout for the Pope that some were expecting: far more faithful, for example, had lined the popemobile routes during Benedict's visit to Poland last May, and the canonization mass in the 11-million-strong city of Sao Paulo fell well short of Vatican hopes for one million participants. The national press, meanwhile, focused on ongoing polemics linked to the issue of abortion, especially after Benedict issued a strong warning (as in ex-communication) to pro-choice politicians on his Rome-Sao Paulo flight.

Ultimately what may have been missing was some kind of bold gesture to demonstrate the Pope's personal connection with the problems of poverty and social unrest that continue to plague much of Latin America. On John Paul's first visit to Brazil in 1980 he spontaneously donated his golden papal ring to a small parish on a walking visit to a shantytown "favela" in Rio de Janeiro. Benedict's visit to the Comunita della Fazenda da Esperanca on Saturday, where recovering addicts told dramatic stories of their troubles, was no doubt heartfelt. But compared with his predecessor's tendency to mix it up with the flock, this came off as a more orchestrated encounter in the protected and bucolic confines of a successful Catholic-run retreat.

Not to say that the German Pope didn't generate and receive a fair share of warmth in a series of encounters and ceremonies in Sao Paulo and the Marian shrine town of Aparecida. He met with Brazilian priests and bishops; led a stadium rally of 30,000 young people; presided over an open-air canonization mass of the first-ever Brazilian-born saint; prayed to the country's patron saint; and inaugurated the Fifth conference of Latin American and Caribbean bishops that began on Sunday in Aparecida. Reading fluently, and occasionally forcefully, in Portuguese, Benedict did his best to get across his message of commitment to the passions and traditions of the faith, and his criticisms of both Marxism and capitalism. In his concluding address Sunday evening to Latin American cardinals, the Pope said the failures of the past century can be blamed on a blind reliance on economic models. "A society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values, even when they are in conflict with private interests," he said.

Emerson Rossi, 50, who walked 400 kilometers from his hometown of Jundiai to attend Sunday's closing mass in Aparecida, as part of his church group Caminho da Fe (Walk of Faith), summed up Benedict's challenge of being in the shadow of his predecessor. "John Paul was a phenomenon. [Benedict] is normal," he said. "John Paul was a charismatic, he was about emotions. We Brazilians are about emotions." The concluding mass drew just 150,000 worshipers, far short of the hundreds of thousand of pilgrims who arrive at the same shrine for the annual mass to commemorate the Virgin Mary.

With the lukewarm reception it generated, the Pope's visit to Brazil only further underlined the continent's feeling that its time has come to lead the Vatican. (Although there's no indication another conclave is near, as Benedict proved to be in notably strong physical shape on his rigorous schedule of events in Brazil.) Among Latin America's "papabili" — those thought to have the requisites to be Pope — are some figures talked about right after John Paul died, and some new names. Benedict has brought Hummes from Sao Paulo to Rome to head the Vatican's office of clergy, making the Brazilian an ever stronger papal candidate. The Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is believed to have received more votes in the 2005 conclave than anyone but Ratzinger, is a favorite of traditionalists. Cardinal Francisco Javier Err�zuriz Ossa of Santiago, Chile, has emerged as a forceful figure on the continent.

One Latin American who has been talked about as papal material even before he became Cardinal in 2001 is Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras. In an interview Saturday with TIME at the convent in Aparecida where he's staying during the bishops conference, Cardinal Rodriguez said a future Pope from Latin America "would be a great blessing" for the Church.

"It's not a question of nationality," he said. "It's simply because of the situation in the world, and what it would mean to have a Pope from the Third World." Enthusiastic about Benedict's trip to Latin America, Rodriguez says the German's election was a sign that "the holy spirit saw that the Church in Europe is in great difficulty and so it gave us a Pope who knows these problems well. He is a great intellectual who can dialogue at the highest level with anyone," he said. "I know the spirit will shift in the direction of other countries and continents in the future." For Emerson Rossi the future is a 57-year-old auxiliary bishop of Sao Paulo, Joaquim Justino Carreira, who may well be on his way to a Cardinal post. And if Benedict stays healthy for another decade or more, Rossi points out, Carreira would be the perfect age to become the next Pope.