Washington Post, The Judgment of São Miguel: A Catholic Priest, an Evangelical Pastor and the Battle for Souls in the Deepest Amazon:
When the rains finally receded, Father Moisés Oliveira pulled his motorboat out into the swollen Purus River and pointed it downstream. Chugging down muddy waters toward the next community on his schedule, the Catholic priest felt uncertain. He’d heard all about the problems in São Miguel.
Like so many other isolated settlements scattered throughout the Amazon rainforest, São Miguel was historically Catholic. Not that long ago, when Father Moisés would make his annual journey there, his presence was a community event — the only time when the people of São Miguel could attend Mass, have their babies baptized and make confession. The squat church could never fit all the faithful.
But that was before the arrival of an evangelical Protestant pastor in early 2020, before the opening of the community’s first evangelical church, before a fever of conversions split the community and turned it against itself. Longtime friends stopped talking. Families fractured. …
Father Moisés hadn’t met the pastor, nor heard him preach, but his charisma was no secret. Evangelicals said they’d never heard anyone speak of God as he did. Thin and tanned, hands calloused from years of wielding a chain saw, the pastor looked no different from thousands of others struggling to survive along the Purus. But followers said he’d been touched by divine providence. He was rumored to have banished malevolent spirits and cured illnesses. He claimed to be illiterate but somehow read the Bible with fluency. Wherever he went, Catholics renounced their church and followed him.
The next day, Father Moisés would step up to the altar of the Catholic church and be forced to reckon with the pastor’s impact. He didn’t know how many faithful he’d find in the pews at the annual Mass or whether the community could still even be considered Catholic. He could only be sure that whatever was happening in São Miguel was not unique to it.
In his 36 years, Father Moisés had witnessed a marked retreat of Catholicism across Latin America, where evangelical Protestants were increasingly challenging its historic dominance. The collapse had been particularly swift in the priest’s own Brazil — the church’s strongest redoubt by measure of Catholic adherents. His vast, deeply Christian country, whose Catholic roots reached back to Portuguese colonization, was now being reborn evangelical.
In the roughly two decades since he entered seminary, the number of evangelical churches had tripled, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research, and now accounted for 7 out of 10 religious establishments. Nearly 180 million of his fellow Brazilians — 84 percent of the population — were baptized Catholic, Vatican statistics show. But so many had turned away from his church that soon, demographers say, if not already, Brazil would for the first time no longer be majority-Catholic. …
[I]n the autumn of 2019, scores of bishops from the Amazon forest traveled to Rome with an urgent warning for Pope Francis: The Catholic Church was losing its hold on the region. People were converting to more expressive forms of evangelical Christianity — sometimes called charismatic or Pentecostal — which often entailed speaking in tongues and faith healing and emphasized a daily struggle between good and evil. One prominent poll showed that slightly more people already identified as evangelical than Catholic across most of the Brazilian Amazon.
The unique challenges posed by the rainforest — immense size, wide dispersion of villages, few roads — had exacerbated the church’s shortage of priests. Some communities were going a full year without seeing a member of the clergy. The bishops urged radical change: Grant priestly powers to married men, breaking with the bedrock tenet of clerical celibacy, and increase the reach of the cloth. “We have to change,” pleaded one Amazon bishop, Wilmar Santin.
But the Catholic Church did not, and Father Moisés, one of only 78 priests in a swath of forest larger than Illinois, returned to the rivers of Acre state to do what he could. …
High above the river, Leudo Alencar could see nothing but forest, water and sky. After so many years of religious struggle along the Purus, he enjoyed the isolation of this house, where, he liked to say, “I hide myself away” from those who might wish him harm. Seclusion seemed particularly important in São Miguel, where Pastor Leudo, 50, knew that his work opening the community’s first evangelical church had made him powerful enemies.
He was no stranger to risk. That had been the life he chose decades earlier, when he attended his first evangelical celebration and, at age 18, found not only a new faith but his life’s mission: to evangelize along the Purus and challenge the long dominance of Catholicism.
He had built his first church at the river’s edge in the mid-1990s in the community of Novo Amparo. The reception was unlike anything he had expected. People came in droves, desperate for God. It convinced him, he said, of the weakness of the Catholic Church. Its priests, largely outsiders, were entirely absent. Their scholarship was another barrier. In a region where few had much formal education, people couldn’t relate to them. But they did to him — an illiterate farmhand who hadn’t needed the vow of poverty taken by some priests because poverty was all he’d ever known.
That first church led to another, in Ramal. And another, in Sardinha. His expansion along the Purus made him a figure of respect among the area’s prominent evangelicals, but also plunged the river into religious division. The Catholics who didn’t convert blamed him for it. …
The leader of the village’s Catholic church, Adelson Queiroz, would barely speak to him. He wanted to tell Adelson they weren’t enemies, but allies. Those whom Adelson couldn’t reach with Catholicism, Pastor Leudo could bring to God through evangelicalism. But he didn’t know if Adelson would listen. Many of the villagers attending Pastor Leudo’s celebrations had been close to Adelson. Young Rosa, whom Pastor Leudo had seen more and more of in recent months, had been like a daughter to Adelson, someone he had been grooming for Catholic leadership. …
Adelson couldn’t understand the pastor’s appeal and, at first, didn’t take him seriously. The pastor had none of the religious training of the Catholic priesthood. The services held at his church — which he built gallingly close to the Catholic church — made even less sense to Adelson. Just a lot of shouting and crying and indecipherable tongues. Adelson didn’t know how anyone could see God in that noise. It stunned him that some did. And that even more then followed.
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