SAO PAULO, BRAZIL — The pop-idol priest strides to the altar like the star that he is, a rock band pounding away to his right, cameras flashing to his left and the multitudes pulsating in this cavernous ex-factory that serves as a church.
"Hold the hand of Jesus!" Father Marcelo Rossi, a dynamic giant in a red cassock and billowing white sleeves, proclaims into the cordless mike, urging the faithful to hold hands. "God is tops! God is tops!"
Rossi is the kind of priest who just might be able to save the Roman Catholic Church here. Brazil has more believers than any other country, but the church has been steadily losing members to evangelical denominations.
Rossi is also just the kind of priest that Pope Benedict XVI, who arrives here Wednesday, is likely to frown upon.
Benedict is making his first papal trip to the Americas, home to half the planet's Catholics, and will face a church replete with competing visions of how to retain the faithful and win back those who have left. The five-day Brazil visit also will serve as an important test of whether a pope seen as a rigid, Europe-focused intellectual, who stresses traditional dogma over creative worship, can reach and influence today's Latin America.
He has scolded the region's church in the past, most notably over leftist liberation theology, which emphasizes political activism in the fight for justice for the poor. Catholics here, from bishops gathering to meet with the pontiff to the tens of thousands of worshipers who will crowd around him, are eager to see what direction he will take: Will he embrace the diversity, or will he end up alienating a hopeful but disoriented flock?
For many here, including Rossi, the greatest challenge to Catholicism is the flashy, feel-good magnetism of the Pentecostals and other Protestant evangelical groups, and the best response is to borrow from the competition. Rossi, 39, packs the Sanctuary of the Byzantine Rosary every week. Legions of supporters, especially among the poor, have made his Masses a televised hit.
On his makeshift altar, a poster of a smiling "Bento XVI" looks down as Rossi gyrates and urges enthusiastic worshipers into a hug fest of songs, candles, blessings and tears.
"I was away from the church for 35 years, and Padre Marcelo brought me back," said Maria dos Santos, 59, one of more than 5,000 who came to see the famous priest's service on a recent evening.
