Pope shames Brazilian church for Catholic exodus
NICOLE WINFIELD and JENNY BARCHFIELD 17 hours ago
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Pope Francis issued blunt, soul-searching criticism Saturday of the Brazilian church's failure to stem the "exodus" of Catholics to evangelical congregations, challenging the region's bishops to be closer to the people to understand their problems and persuade them that Catholicism isn't "barren, fruitless soil."
In the longest and most important speech of his four-month pontificate, Francis drove home a message he has emphasized throughout his first international trip to World Youth Day: 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.
Francis took a direct swipe at the "intellectual" message of the church that so characterized the pontificate of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. He said ordinary Catholics simply don't 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."
http://news.yahoo.com/pope-shames-brazilian-church-catholic-exodus-203429551.html
