Francis implicitly criticises his predecessor and tells bishops the church looks like 'a prisoner of its own rigid formulas'
Pope Francis drew an estimated 3m flag-waving faithful to Rio's Copacabana beach on Saturday for the final evening of World Youth Day, hours after he chastised the Brazilian church for failing to stem the "exodus" of Catholics to evangelical congregations.
Francis headed into the final hours of his first international trip riding a remarkable wave of popularity. By the time his open-sided car reached the stage for the vigil service on Saturday night, the back seat was piled high with football jerseys, flags and flowers tossed to him by adoring pilgrims lining the beachfront route.
The vigil capped a busy day for the pope in which he drove home a message he has emphasizsed throughout the week in speeches, homilies and off-the-cuff remarks: the need for Catholics, lay and religious, to shake up the status quo, get out of their stuffy sacristies and reach the faithful on the margins of society or risk losing them to rival churches.
In the longest and most important speech of his four-month pontificate, Francis took a direct swipe at the "intellectual" message of the church that so characterised the pontificate of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Speaking to Brazil's bishops, he said ordinary Catholics didn't understand such lofty ideas and needed to hear the simpler message of love, forgiveness and mercy that he said was at the core of the Catholic faith.
"At times we lose people because they don't understand what we are saying, because we have forgotten the language of simplicity and import an intellectualism foreign to our people," he said. "Without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery."
Francis asked bishops to reflect on why hundreds of thousands of Catholics had left the church for Protestant and Pentecostal congregations that have grown exponentially in recent decades, particularly in Brazil's slums or favelas, where their charismatic message and nuts-and-bolts advice has been welcomed.
According to census data, the number of Catholics in Brazil dipped from 125m in 2000 to 123m in 2010, with the church's share of the total population dropping from 74% to 65%. Over the same period, the number of evangelical Protestants and Pentecostals skyrocketed from 26m to 42m, increasing from 15% to 22% of the population in 2010.
Francis offered a breathtakingly blunt list of explanations for the "exodus."
"Perhaps the church appeared too weak, perhaps too distant from their needs, perhaps too poor to respond to their concerns, perhaps too cold, perhaps too caught up with itself, perhaps a prisoner of its own rigid formulas," he said. "Perhaps the world seems to have made the church a relic of the past, unfit for new questions. Perhaps the church could speak to people in their infancy but not to those come of age."
The Vatican said Francis read the five-page speech in its entirety to the 300 or so bishops gathered for lunch in the auditorium of the Rio archbishop's residence. He was due to speak to the bishops of Latin America on Sunday before heading back to Rome, said the Rev Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.
Copacabana beach was overflowing for the final vigil on Saturday night. Local media, citing information from the mayor's office, said 3m people were on hand for the vigil – three times as many as at the last World Youth Day vigil in Madrid in 2011.
Rio's mayor estimated as many as 3m people might turn out for Sunday's culminating Mass.
The Argentinian pope began his day with a Mass in Rio's beehive-like modern cathedral where he exhorted 1,000 bishops from around the world to go out and find the faithful, a more diplomatic expression of the direct, off-the-cuff instructions he delivered to young Argentinian pilgrims on Thursday.
In those remarks, he urged the youngsters to make a "mess" in their dioceses and shake things up, even at the expense of confrontation with their bishops and priests.
"We cannot keep ourselves shut up in parishes, in our communities when so many people are waiting for the Gospel," Francis said in his homily on Saturday. "It's not enough simply to open the door in welcome, but we must go out through that door to seek and meet the people."