Church’s tone-deaf move to canonize Serra will drive people away
On my walk home from work, I pass three storefront evangelical churches.
The women wear long skirts, the men wear boxy suits, the children have clean collars.
Some of them were born here, and some of them are immigrants from Mexico or El Salvador or Nicaragua or elsewhere in Latin America, but the crucial point is that they are all from traditionally Catholic cultures, and they’ve all chosen a different church.
Or perhaps I should say that I thought about why, despite a wildly popular Latin American pope, the church is struggling to hold onto believers even where it’s strongest.
[...] that the church is finally being forced to look at the Latin Americans who are left, it wants to canonize a man whose career included brutalizing indigenous people — people who look like, well, current Latin Americans.
Since it could just as easily choose to leave Serra alone, the church is also saying that it doesn’t care.
[...] I peek inside those three evangelical churches every night on my way home.
Though their pews may be humble — folding chairs, not wooden benches — they’re always full.