Pope Benedict XVI's first trip to Latin America has added to a sense, expressed recently by supporters and critics alike, that his papacy seemed to be moving closer to the mold that he embodied as Joseph Ratzinger, a conservative and contentious cardinal.In a major speech Sunday, the pope condemned capitalism and Marxism as "systems that marginalize God" and urged the Latin American clergy to feed people's spiritual hunger as the way to ease poverty and halt the Roman Catholic Church's steady decline in the region.
Speaking to Latin American bishops here for a conference on the church's direction for the next decade, the pope also condemned abortion and contraception and laws that permit them. Such laws, he said, are "threatening the future of peoples."
The speech was widely anticipated for how Benedict - on his first visit to the Western Hemisphere as pope - would tackle issues from poverty and social injustice to the evangelical groups eroding Roman Catholicism in some Latin American countries at the rate of 1 percent a year.
Just as he, as a cardinal in the 1980s, cracked down on liberation theology, which he viewed as incorrectly emphasizing Christ as social redeemer, Benedict stressed first proclaiming Christ as the son of God - even if many of the poor here might like to hear more about social justice.
"What is real?" he mused in the speech, just hours before heading back to Rome after five days in Brazil, the most populous Roman Catholic country. "Are only material goods, social and economic and political problems 'reality'?"
He told the bishops that, without agreeing first on God, society is unable to tackle the problems of poverty and social injustice.
"Just structures are an indispensable condition for a just society," he said, "but they neither rise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values.
"Where God is absent - God with the human face of Jesus Christ - these values fail to show themselves with their full force; nor does a consensus arise concerning them."
"I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality," he continued. "I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values."
The pope's personal style, praised often even by critics, remains pastoral and gentle. But the more contentious views, less publicly visible when he first began as leader of the world's billion Catholics, seem to be coming more to the fore.
On Wednesday, on the flight to Brazil from Rome, he seemed to weigh in on a particularly sensitive issue for the church: Pro-choice Catholic politicians, he suggested, risk excommunication.
There are other signs of a public turn to the right. He is expected soon to approve the wider usage of the Latin Mass, largely shelved a generation ago. In recent months, the church in Italy has engaged outspokenly in a fight against a proposed law to give rights to unmarried couples, including homosexual ones.
Recently, Benedict spoke about the reality of hell and, despite a free discussion of the issue when he was first elected, he seems to have firmly ruled out any changes to the rules of priestly celibacy as a way to alleviate a shortage of priests in some places, Latin America included.
At the same time, the speech Sunday underscored that the pope remains, as ever, tied not to any set of views apart from his own, through his at-times unpredictable interpretation of what is best for the church and its followers.
In the speech, for example, Benedict railed against abortion and contraception, as hurting the family, but he also called for state-sponsored day care, as helping it.
He also raged with equal fire against Marxism and capitalism alike. By focusing solely on material concerns, he said, both "falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality which is God."
"Both capitalism and Marxism promised to point out the path for the creation of just structures, and they declared that these, once established, would function by themselves," he said. "And this ideological promise has proven false."
Marxism, he said, left "a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction." Capitalism, he said, has failed to bridge the "distance between rich and poor" and is "giving rise to a worrying degradation of personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness."
But on the whole his speech covered ground familiar to those here - some approving, others not - who had followed Ratzinger's long career as theologian and top aide to his predecessor, John Paul II.
"I like his zeal," said Maria da Conceição Xavier Cerqueira, a retired postal worker among the faithful who carried umbrellas to shield themselves from the sun and held rosaries to be blessed at an open air Mass that Pope Benedict celebrated here Sunday. "He was a loyal comrade of John Paul II, and it is good that he is here to defend the traditional values of the Catholic Church, which are under attack from all sides."
Without specifically mentioning liberation theology by name, Benedict, in his speech to the bishops, criticized Catholics who argue that the church's supreme moral duty is to denounce and resist social injustice.
As the Vatican's senior official on matters of doctrine and faith, he led efforts in the 1980s to stamp out the movement, then quite influential in Latin America, and Sunday he again warned the clergy not to permit such concerns to eclipse their spiritual duties.
But some worshippers at the Mass said they would have liked the pope to have offered the same emphasis on overcoming poverty that they are used to hearing from their own bishops.
A group of liberation theology advocates carried a banner saying that theirs was "the church of the option for the poor and excluded," along with photographs of the movement's martyrs, including Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero of El Salvador, murdered while celebrating Mass in 1980, and Dorothy Stang, an American-born nun killed in the Brazilian Amazon in 2005.
The Brazilian Army estimated the crowd that filled the patio alongside the huge Aparecida basilica at 150,000 people, far short of the one million that Vatican Radio had predicted.
Later, in his speech to the clergy at the large shrine to the Virgin Mary in Aparecida, the pope offered what amounted to a revisionist history of the church's origins in Latin America.
The standard view in the region is that the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors, accompanied by clergy, imposed Catholicism in a ruinous process that left native populations, as a common phrase puts it, "between the cross and the sword."
Some modern-day Latin American theologians have lamented the destruction of indigenous civilizations and have sought to incorporate elements of those cultures into the Mass as one way of making amends.
But in a statement likely to be controversial in countries with large Indian populations, including Mexico, Peru, and Ecuador, Benedict rejected those notions.
"In effect, the proclamation of Jesus and of his Gospel did not at any point involve an alienation of the pre-Columbus cultures, nor was it the imposition of a foreign culture," he said.
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