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Surprised so few people talk about Brasil here. Their election (2nd round) is today. It looks like Lula is the slight favourite but even his supporters concede that Bolsonaro has a good shot. For those not in the know, Lula is the social democrat with Bolsonaro best described as "Trump of the Tropics".
Yet a complicating factor is that the new congress has already been elected and it was much more right-wing than expected. So Lula's room for maneuver will be significantly constrained if he happens to win.
There does seem to be a structural undercurrent at play here. A very fast-growing demographic in Brasil are the evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly favour Bolsonaro. Traditionally, Catholicism has been the bedrock of the nation's social fabric, inherited from the Iberians. So a very fervent form of Protestantism is unquestionably a break from the past where Catholicism was viewed as intertwined with national identity. Whoever wins this presidential election will have to grapple with this changed reality in Brasil.
Incidentally, this also suggests the lazy assumption that "as America gets more diverse it will invariably get more liberal" could potentially not come to pass.
I'm surprised this isn't a more widespread phenomenon in Catholic countries (or maybe it is and I'm just uninformed). Pope Francis is a walking counterexample to the infallibility of the Church. The natural response is either to give up the faith entirely, or go full sola scriptura.
The counterexample to the infallibility of the Church is comparing its orthodox doctrines and moral framework to that of the early christians, they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum.
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The Catholic Church does not claim infallibility. It does claim infallibility ex cathedra for the Pope, roughly meaning that if the Pope (qua Pope) says that something concerning faith or morals should be believed by the entire Catholic Church, then every Catholic should believe that he says that they should believe. There are other requirements as well, e.g. the doctrine cannot be new: it must be in conformity with the Bible and with Catholic tradition.
There are sufficiently many clauses in papal infallibility that it is very hard to tell if a Pope was speaking ex cathedra, which has the bonus of make it easy to tell a consistent narrative about papal infallibility if you're a Catholic.
This is the extraordinary mode of the Magisterium. The ordinary mode is the college of bishops united under the Pope throughout the world and in view of the development of doctrine coming gradually to teach the same thing "in all places and at all times." The Church absolutely does claim infallibility on the teaching of faith and morals; the Pope is guaranteed to speak infallibly when invoking the extraordinary Magisterium. Otherwise, the Pope is free to make whatever theological errors he wants provided he does not attempt to teach them to the world (e.g., if Francis were to say in a homily Christ was not God, there'd be no issue (well, except that he probably shouldn't be Pope then), but if he were to do the same in an encyclical, he'd cease to be Pope).
The actual understanding of the Church here is much, much more complex than can be serviced by a Wikipedia article or Reddit comment.
So what is the justification for the church's infallibility on the teaching of faith and morals. If catholic clergymen become united in their agreement that something is a sin, they assume that god agrees?
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Yes, as I said, there are requirements are numerous and frankly beyond my knowledge, since I am neither a Catholic nor a theologian, and you really need to be at least moderately skilled in Catholic theology to follow all the details.
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Even this doesn't quite capture how limited the doctrine of infallibility is in practice. The proclamations widely considered infallible are quite rare, and mostly decide theological questions rather than practical moral ones.
Two things to note here:
(1) the Church absolutely does claim infallibility on matters of faith and doctrine.
(2) such proclamations are only the "extraordinary mode of the Magisterium."
The full number of infallible teachings is unknowable, since it can only be developed over time. But there's no way for the Church to, for example, decide abortion is a-okay after all, even though there's been no formal ex cathedra proclamation on it, because it is a universal, historical, and quite possibly apostolic doctrine.
how does this imply that it is true, or that god forbids it?
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Funny, because I see Pope Francis' insights as refreshingly coherent with the teachings of Jesus. If you think the natural response to the pope making a decree you disagree with is to abandon faith, then i would suggest you aren't a catholic to begin with.
It has to be admitted, whether you agree with pope Francis’s theology or not, that almost none of it is either insightful nor in straightforward accordance with the most established teaching of the church on those topics. His leadership from an administrative perspective has also been astonishingly poor and unusually given to corruption, foot in mouth disease, and inconsistency.
That the current pontificate is causing a crisis of faith isn’t a mystery; you have a pope who is both a poor administrator and who commits a series of unforced theological errors that reach their pinnacle in literally worshipping a pagan idol, and there are no Catholics alive today who remember a pope worse than mediocre.
Can you elaborate on this? The papers here in Northern Europe don't really talk about catholic church much for rather obvious reasons.
Here's one collection of examples of poor management(yes, a lot of this is preexisting issues that the current pope has made worse, unraveled recent progress, or simply failed to improve after it blew up): https://www.forbes.com/sites/magteam/2021/10/03/the-popes-corruption-problems/?sh=19bffb1c54c9 Becciu has since been allowed to appear as a cardinal in public at the recent consistory of cardinals.
Some other examples include elevating Kevin Farrell(notorious for having lived with the ex-cardinal McCarrick and having received large, unexplained cash gifts while bishop of Dallas) to the cardinalate, a "reform" of the knights of Malta that appears to be little more than revenge against his ideological enemies that he himself put there, making large breaks with precedent in poorly worded motu proprios(a category of church legislation heavily used in regulating the application of canon law), with his suppression of the latin mass in particular seeming to have managed to alienate at least a few left wing cardinals who don't like traditionalists very much, and revocations of previously granted permissions to one group or other within the church for little to no reason alienating almost everyone, sacking of a sitting bishop in Puerto Rico with no explanation(sacking a sitting bishop at all being rarest of rare), and a controversy involving ecumenism with the Russian orthodox church that I don't claim to understand but which has something to do with Ukraine. There's also some vague plans to completely change the relationship of the clergy and religious to existing church structures.
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I think most people today don't realize Catholics had a Pope literally declared a heretic at one point. We've had much worse popes. The Catholic claims do not rely on a perfect pope who believes, professes, and acts perfectly all the time. This post has a good summary of what Catholics mean and don't mean about papal infallability.
It's just weird that Catholics had a run of fairly upstanding and holy popes compared to the historical norm. Pope Francis is a regression to the mean.
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I think having the fertility statues present on the church grounds is odd but to suggest their presence is evidence that the pope worships them is a huge stretch to me. If the pope was saying "lets all pray to gaia" i would agree with your alarmist stance, but he didn't, and he wouldn't. Perhaps in a changing world, God is instructing Pope Francis differently than popes past.
The pope actually literally worshipped that statue on at least one occasion at the opening ceremony of the synod on the Amazon- although there's no documentation that he's done so since then, he has defended having done so.
Well, I guess you can't prove what he was thinking/intending. But prostrating before a statue of a fertility goddess while offerings are being made to it fits most definitions of worship.
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Ironically, you would think that Catholics would not lump these two together, given how often they get accused of idolatry towards saints and icons of saints. I mean maybe the pope is in fact worshipping some pagan gods, IDK his heart. But if anyone should be expected to have a nuanced distinction between "having a representation of a thing" and "worshipping the thing", it should be Catholics.
Isn't how often they get accused of idolatry increasing the likelihood of other forms of idolatry in other forms?
Nah. That angle would make sense if it was Protestants criticizing the pope for this - a Protestant might say "he already practices idolatry towards the saints, it's hardly a surprise if he starts worshipping a pagan goddess too".
But we're talking criticism from Catholics. From their perspective, the accusations of idolatry are baseless, because they know that they aren't worshipping saints just because they have some icon representing a saint. So from that perspective, they should know damn well that if the pope has some pagan statue around, it doesn't therefore mean he's worshipping it.
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I know that evangelical missionaries have been working hard in South America since the the turn of the century: apparently the number of protestant missionaries in South America increased 690% between 1910 and 1969, much more than in other regions. So a lot of this is not a recent phenomenon, but the result of efforts made many decades ago by a lot of mission organizations. As far as I can tell, Africa and Asia were the primary focus of protestant missionaries during the 19th century, primarily because the people there were "unreached" (that is, not any variety of Christian already) while the South Americans were at least Catholic. Why convert Catholics when there are so many pagans who've never even heard of Christ? In the early 20th century, the collapse of China meant it was a much more dangerous mission field, which only got worse during WWII. So apparently a lot of missionaries pivoted from Asia to South America. After WWII the PRC made it extremely difficult to be a foreign missionary in China and Southeast Asia was collapsing into a variety of armed conflicts, so South America continued to receive more focus than it had previously. Notably, while different brands of protestant sometimes butted heads in Africa and Asia, they generally decided that none of them were as bad as the Catholics and tended to work together in South America instead of in competition.
The real story is the rise of Pentecostalism. Pentecostals are a variety of evangelical that is very much "charismatic": that means speaking in tongues, faith healing, prophecy, miracles, etc. It's taken off like wildfire in South America, particularly among the poor. Pentecostalism can be particularly appealing to the poor because generally in order to become a leader of a Pentecostal church you don't need to go to seminary, you just need to be chosen by the Holy Spirit. What that comes down to is having enough people believe that you were chosen to lead the group. It means they have a lot more trouble with problematic theology, but it also means you can start a new churches very quickly.
The Pentecostals are also the fruit of all those decades of protestant mission efforts: one the the first things protestant mission organizations did was set up schools to teach people to read and distribute millions of Bibles. Once enough poor people can read the Bible themselves, they're going to end up attracted to denominations like the Pentecostals that are very egalitarian with little hierarchy. The kind of church where anybody can stand up in the middle of worship and start preaching.
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The only "Catholic countries" left are in Eastern Europe and have cultural attitudes of "eh, we get bad leaders from time to time religiously as well as secularly". Latin America becoming more and more protestant is a widespread phenomenon partly tied to non-religious social dynamics in those countries and partly tied to the way in which the Catholic church politicized itself.
Could you elaborate on the Latin America factors? I don't know the social dynamics, and I'm curious how Roman Catholic politicization has gone there.
This is a very broad overview, but the TDLR is that Latin American gender roles and social dysfunction are pretty bad in much of it, and evangelicalism offers a socially acceptable reason to do things the way the church crowd tells everyone to do things- without the burden of convincing people you take catholicism seriously(most Latin American Catholics are more or less secularized and the church is often seen as discredited). For political factors, Latin America’s history in the latter 20th century was, well, I think you know the gist, and clerics who weren’t interested in cooperating with right wing authoritarian regimes sided with socialism, conveniently discrediting both sides. Add to that pope Francis like leadership(that is, erratic, corrupt, ineffectual, given to fringe ideas, nepotistic, and steadily worsening) in general and the effects of the sex abuse crisis, and you’ve got both the religious people mad at the church for being almost literally either communists or fascists and going too far with post-Vatican II experimentation and poor leadership and everyone else mad at it for being a train wreck that made astonishingly poor political choices.
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