Word: latinizing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nominal Bastion. Vatican officials like to think of the continent civilized by cross and sword as a bastion of Christianity. It is something less than that. Although 90% of Latin America is nominally Catholic, probably fewer than 10% of the people practice what the church preaches. Thousands turn out for such semireligious spectaculars as Lima's festival honoring Our Lord of the Miracles, but grandmothers and schoolchildren are often about the only worshipers at Sunday Mass in the ancient, silent churches. In Brazil, perhaps 25 million people are devotees of a voodoo cult called macumba. Across the continent...
Even worse, the church lacks the ecclesiastical manpower to serve the sheep still within the fold. The ratio of priests to laymen in Latin America is 1 to 5,600 (in the U.S. it is 1 to 785). The Catholic seminary in La Paz, Bolivia, currently has only one seminarian; when he is ordained, he will be the institution's first new priest in four years. Almost half of the continent's clergy are foreigners, most of them Spaniards, Italians and Irish-Americans. More often than not, they are better-educated and more zealous than the native priests...
...major address in Bogota, Pope Paul is expected to urge the church to support moderate economic and political reforms, in the spirit of his social encyclical Populorum Progressio. The unanswered question is whether that sound and humane advice will be too late in coming. Latin America's reactionary clerics, who enthusiastically endorsed his decree on birth control, are not likely to change their ways overnight. Nor are the rebel Catholics, who are already committed to support of violence as man's only hope. To some observers, Latin American Catholicism is heading toward something very like a schism-based...
...smaller universities (10,000 to 12,000 students each) with American-style academic departments and a de-emphasis of lectures in favor of more "research, discussion, dialogue." He also hopes to prepare more students for these universities by accenting modern science and living languages, rather than classics and Latin, in the lycees (secondary schools...
That unsolicited testimonial comes from Rhodesia's retired hangman, Edward ("The Dropper") Milton, and it is in praise of the fiber extracted from a cactus-like plant that grows mostly in Africa and Latin America. Not everyone, however, feels the same affection for sisal. Though it is still used in rope, twine, potato sacks and carpets, sisal is being steadily replaced by nylon and other synthetics. Its last bastion is agricultural twine, which now accounts for 75% of world sisal production...