A Troubled Flock Will Greet the Pope in Brazil : Vatican: A shortage of priests and the explosive growth of evangelical churches are cause for worry.

NATAL, Brazil —  Father Edmilson Ribeiro’s Catholic parish on the southern edge of Natal has six churches and a total population of more than 60,000, but Ribeiro is its only priest. His difficulty in keeping in touch with the people is all too common among priests in Brazil, which has more baptized Catholics than any other country.

“The father can’t give that personal attention, case by case,” lamented Ribeiro, 43, a round-faced man with close-fitting cap of black hair.

Another problem facing Brazilian Catholics is the prolific growth of evangelical Protestant churches and other religious groups that many Catholic leaders refer to as “sects.” And one advantage evangelicals enjoy, according to Ribeiro, is the personal contact their pastors often can maintain with members of small, closely knit congregations.

“The pastor visits anyone who is sick,” the priest said. “We get there when someone dies.”

The problems that frustrate Ribeiro are among many that beleaguer and perplex Brazil’s Catholic Church as it awaits the arrival today of Pope John Paul II. Starting here on Brazil’s northeastern coast, the 71-year-old Pope will visit 10 cities in as many days on his second Brazilian tour in a decade.

John Paul has polished his Portuguese, Brazil’s language, with a tutor in recent weeks. He will have much to say to his largest national fold about how it should pull together to overcome its troubles.

At the Vatican, where doctrinal conservatives reign, the strong liberal wing of the Brazilian church is viewed with reservations because it is seen as being too nationally oriented and too independent-minded. The Vatican also worries about flagging faith and too few priestly vocations in Brazil.

It worries about too much Africa and too little Catholicism in Afro-Catholic celebrations, and about the resilience of non-Christian African cults. About half of all Brazilians are descendants of African slaves, and Afro-Brazilian religions flourish throughout the country.

Perhaps most of all, the Vatican worries about the phenomenal advance of evangelical churches.

In 1980, the year of the most recent census and of John Paul II’s first visit to Brazil, Protestants made up an estimated 6.5% of the population. The Brazilian Evangelical Assn., which includes most of the country’s Protestant churches, says 18% of all Brazilian adults and youths are practicing Protestants.

In a nation that was nominally 95% Catholic 50 years ago, and one that now has a total population of more than 150 million, those figures merit the Pope’s special concern. He also is expected to be paying close attention to doctrinal developments in Brazil.

Analysts say the Vatican likes the vibrant, activist nature of the Brazilian church, but it is anxious that the doctrinal core of the faith not be obscured by the social commitment of liberal clergy. John Paul will insist here on orthodox doctrinal instruction, particularly in seminaries.

Since becoming Pope in 1978, John Paul has split up the giant Sao Paulo diocese of liberal Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, undermining the archbishop’s power base, and has named numerous conservative bishops, diluting the once-dominant influence of liberals in the Brazilian Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The Vatican apparently believes that it has won the war in Brazil over liberation theology, the Marxist-influenced movement that encourages Catholics to fight against social and economic oppression. Rome has severely reprimanded members of the movement in Brazil, including the famed theologian friar Leonardo Boff, and the conservative crackdown has been aided lately by the international collapse of communism.

Few theologians now subscribe to Marxist analysis. Among liberal Latin Americans at the Vatican, in fact, communism’s death is now portrayed as a blessing.

“The fall of the Wall is one of the best things that ever happened to us,” said a Brazilian cleric in Rome. “Now governments and the political right in Latin America can no longer accuse us of wanting communism when we assert peoples’ just rights to social justice.”

But the Brazilian church remains seriously split between liberals and conservatives, a division that has been clear this week as bishops met in a national Eucharistic conference in Natal.

Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves, the Brazilian primate, decried the decay of moral values on Brazilian television, which he called “the worst in the world, sordid.”

In contrast, Bishop Marcelo Pinto Carvalheira, from the impoverished northeastern state of Paraiba, called for agrarian reform and accused large landholders of oppressing and persecuting peasants and priests.

Agrarian reform and labor power are among social causes promoted by the liberation theology movement, which spread through Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. The movement created thousands of lay groups called christian base communities that focused more on political than on spiritual matters.

But the movement appears to be in decline, according to anthropologist Regina Novaes, president of the non-denominational Superior Institute for Religious Studies in Rio de Janeiro. Since the Brazilian armed forces left power in 1985, she said, other organizations have been more free to assume liberation theology’s political role.

Novaes predicted that a new spiritual and evangelistic “offensive” will recover at least some of the ground lost by the Brazilian Catholic Church. And that, she said, is the main purpose of the Pope’s visit.

But Father Jesus Hortal, the Spanish-born director of the Theology Department at Catholic University in Rio, said the church’s main handicap in its evangelistic drive will continue to be a shortage of priests.

“At the moment there is a clear increase in vocations in Brazil, but not at the rate that would be necessary,” Hortal said. It is a vicious circle, he added: “There aren’t clergymen because (Catholic) evangelization is weak, and evangelization is weak because there aren’t clergymen.”

The Catholic Church in Brazil has an estimated 14,000 priests, including foreigners. Estimates of the number of Protestant pastors go as high as 40,000.

Lack of widespread Catholic evangelization and the religious ignorance of Brazilians baptized in the church has left “vacant spaces” for evangelical Protestants and other religious groups to move in, Hortal said.

Father Esteban Bittencourt, director of the Rio diocese’s Ecclesiastical and Philosophy Faculty, said Brazilians who have left the church and joined “sects” are unlikely to return to the Catholic fold.

“These sects are very aggressive, very polemical,” Bittencourt said. “It is hard for them to return to the Catholic Church because of that brainwashing.”

He said the Catholic Church needs to develop “hotter” liturgies with more popular magnetism, it needs to make better use of television and radio, and it needs to create new parishes in growing urban areas.

The Rev. Caio Fabio D’Araujo Filho, a Presbyterian minister who is president of the Brazilian Evangelical Assn., agreed that the Catholic Church will have to make major changes if it is to compete with Protestant evangelicals. “If it continued the way it was, it would lose its primacy in the country,” D’Araujo said.

He said that while an estimated 8 million Brazilian Catholics attend Mass on a normal Sunday, 20 million Protestants go to church.

But D’Araujo said the Charismatic Catholic Renovation movement, a growing faction of world Catholicism with a popular evangelical style, offers hope for the Brazilian church.

“I think the salvation of the Catholic Church will be the charismatics, to keep it from losing the country’s soul,” he said. “They pray like evangelicals, they are informal like evangelicals, and often they even use evangelical teaching materials.”

Neuza Maria da Silva, a member of the Assembly of God Church in Natal, said that being “born again” in Christ is the only salvation, and the Catholic Church does not offer that.

She said she will not go to see the Pope when he comes to Natal, but she has nothing against him.

“We are going to pray for him to be saved,” she said.