BRAZIL:Pope Benedict XVI ended his five-day trip to what he called the "Continent of Hope" yesterday with an address at the opening of a conference of bishops from Latin America and the Caribbean in Aparecida, Brazil.
The conference has brought together more than 160 cardinals and bishops representing 40 countries, who over the next 18 days will discuss how to meet the challenge posed to the Catholic Church in the region by new evangelical Protestant churches.
Nearly half the world's 1.1 billion Catholics are from Latin America, but in recent decades homegrown evangelical churches have converted many Catholics to Pentecostalism. Earlier in his trip Pope Benedict said the growth of the region's evangelical movement showed there was a "thirst for God" and called on the Catholic Church to be more active in meeting the demand.
The pope angered some evangelical leaders by labelling their churches "sects" and accusing them of using aggressive tactics to win over new followers.
The conference will also debate the crisis caused by the shortage of Catholic vocations and the church's role in combating the region's endemic social inequality. An estimated 150,000 pilgrims attended a Mass the pope celebrated at the opening of the conference, the last of his five-day trip to Brazil, the world's most populous Catholic nation.
As with the other set piece occasions of the visit, the numbers at yesterday's Mass were well below expectations.
As the bishops met, followers of Latin America's liberation theology movement held a parallel conference to discuss the same issues.
Liberation theology is a movement in the Latin American Church that emphasises the church's role in the struggle for social justice.
In the 1980s Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, led the Vatican's campaign against the movement, saying that it was too influenced by Marxism.
Though it is still strong at grass roots level in many Latin American countries, liberation theology's supporters have largely been sidelined from the church's hierarchy.
On Saturday the pope visited a drug rehabilitation centre where he condemned South America's drug trade. The continent supplies the world with cocaine and Brazil is, after the US, the biggest consumer of the drug, which is blamed for much of the violence that terrorises its big cities.
In a direct address to the region's drug traffickers the pope warned that "God will call you to account for your deeds" and asked them to "reflect on the grave harm they are inflicting on countless young people and on adults from every level of society".