Pope Francis drew a reported three million flag-waving, rosary-toting faithful to Rio's Copacabana beach for the final evening of World Youth Day, hours after he chastised the Brazilian church for failing to stem the "exodus" of Catholics to evangelical congregations.
The pope headed into the final hours of his first international trip riding a remarkable wave of popularity: by the time his open-sided car reached the stage for the vigil service last night, the back seat was piled high with football shirts, flags and flowers tossed to him by adoring pilgrims lining the beachfront route.
On the beach, pilgrims staked out their spots on the sand, lounged and snacked, preparing for an all-night party ahead of the final Mass today. Many of those actually paying attention to the vigil had tears in their eyes, moved by Pope Francis’s call for them to build up their church like his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, was called to do.
“Jesus offers us something bigger than the World Cup!” he said, drawing cheers from the crowd in this football-mad nation.
The vigil capped a busy day for the pope in which he drove home a message he has emphasised throughout the week in speeches, homilies and off-the-cuff remarks: the need for Catholics, lay and religious, to shake up the status quo, get out of their stuffy sacristies and reach the faithful on the margins of society or risk losing them to rival churches.
In the longest and most important speech of his four-month pontificate, the pope took a direct swipe at the “intellectual” message of the church that so characterised the pontificate of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Speaking to Brazil’s bishops, he said ordinary Catholics simply do not understand such lofty ideas and need to hear the simpler message of love, forgiveness and mercy that is at the core of the Catholic faith.
“At times we lose people because they don’t understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people,” he said. “Without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery.”
In a speech outlining the kind of church he wants, Pope Francis asked bishops to reflect on why hundreds of thousands of Catholics have left the church for Protestant and Pentecostal congregations that have grown exponentially in recent decades in Brazil, particularly in its slums or favelas, where their charismatic message and nuts-and-bolts advice is welcomed by the poor.
According to census data, the number of Catholics in Brazil dipped from 125 million in 2000 to 123 million in 2010, with the church’s share of the total population dropping from 74 per cent to 65 per cent. During the same time period, the number of evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals skyrocketed from 26 million to 42 million, increasing from 15 per cent to 22 per cent of the population in 2010.
Pope Francis offered a breathtakingly blunt list of explanations for the “exodus”.
“Perhaps the church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas,” he said. “Perhaps the world seems to have made the church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions. Perhaps the church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age.”
Pope Francis asked if the church today can still “warm the hearts” of its faithful with priests who take time to listen to their problems and remain close to them.
“We need a church capable of rediscovering the maternal womb of mercy,” he said. “Without mercy, we have little chance nowadays of becoming part of a world of ‘wounded’ persons in need of understanding, forgiveness and love.”
Despite Pope Francis’s critical assessment of the sorry state of the church in Brazil, the pope’s reception in Rio has shown that he can draw quite a crowd. Copacabana beach’s four kilometres (2.5 miles) of white sand was overflowing for the final vigil on Saturday night, thanks also to Mother Nature which finally co-operated with chilly but dry temperatures after days of rain.
Local media, citing information from the mayor’s office, said three million people were on hand for the vigil; calls to the mayor’s office were not immediately returned. That is far higher than the one million at the last World Youth Day vigil in Madrid in 2011, and far more than the 650,000 at Toronto’s 2002 vigil.
Rio’s mayor had estimated earlier in the day that as many as three million people might turn out for today’s culminating Mass.