Straight from central casting, a Catholic answer to Pentecostal preachers

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
Tegucigalpa, Honduras

Had someone called central casting in a Hollywood studio and asked for a Catholic look-alike of the magnetic Pentecostal preachers today marching across Latin America, they could not have done much better than Oscar Osorio.

Osorio, an articulate Honduran layman with a wife and four children, is a leader in the Catholic Charismatic movement in Central America. He’s also a star of Channel 48, the Catholic television network in Honduras, where his compelling Bible-based preaching opens each morning’s programming.

In a Catholic culture without much tradition of lay activism, Osorio is a rare bird – a full-time lay preacher with a wide regional following.

Part of Osorio’s appeal is that he unabashedly speaks the same deeply personal, spiritual language which has driven the phenomenal growth of Pentecostal Christianity across the globe. According to a recent Pew Trust study, Pentecostalism exploded from six percent to 25 percent of the global Christian population during the 20th century.

Osorio laughs that a growing number of Pentecostals attend his retreats, some telling him afterwards: “Great preaching, brother … it’s hard to believe you’re Catholic!”

Many Catholics here hope the church will embrace the future to which they believe Osorio points during the upcoming fifth general conference of CELAM, the bishops’ conference of Latin America, in Brazil in May. It’s based on aggressive grassroots evangelization, learning in some ways from what’s worked for the Pentecostals, and led by passionate Catholic laity.

“Our current pastoral model is exhausted,” said Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, in a March 20 interview with NCR in Tegucigalpa. Like Osorio, Rodriguez favors a program of missionary outreach led by lay people, and rooted in Scripture.

“We lost our people by the Word, and we have to recover them by the Word,” he said.

Osorio, 52, seems made to order for that mission.

He was born into a Seventh Day Adventist family, but Osorio only went to services twice in his life. His father abandoned the family when Oscar was five years old, and he was basically “un-churched” – until he met his future wife in his early 20s. She was involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and insisted that Osorio come with her to Mass. (Oscar laughs now that he didn’t have any idea what was going on, and says that the only part he liked was the exchange of peace.)

By this stage, Osorio was a cut-throat businessman, running a successful printing company, and well on his way to killing himself with booze. (Osorio said he had been an alcoholic since he was 14.)

“I didn’t believe in God, and I especially didn’t believe in priests or in the church,” Osorio said.

Finally, his wife demanded that he go to a Catholic charismatic retreat. Again, Osorio says, he had no idea what a “retreat” was. As part of the experience, everyone was supposed to make a confession, something Osorio dreaded, in part because he had never done it before.

“There were five priests at the retreat, and I decided to look for the oldest one, because I thought he would be the easiest. There was one elderly priest who could barely hear, and I saw all the man lining up to go to him,” Osorio recalled, laughing.

“When it was my turn, I started letting everyone else go in front of me, telling them that I knew the priest,” Osorio said. “I guess that was one more lie I would have to confess. When it finally came my turn, I was paralyzed and didn’t want to move, but the priest pointed at me, and called me forward.”

At that stage, Osorio said, he felt something well up in him, an inexplicable need to bare his soul. For the next two hours, he said, he reviewed his entire life up to that point, and decided it was time to make a break with the man he had been before.

The next day, Osorio made his first communion.

“I was the only one to drink from the cup,” he said. “”I felt something burning in me, something powerful, but it didn’t hurt. It was a feeling of joy and liberation.”

From that point forward, Osorio said he felt like a changed man. He said that during the next day at the retreat he tried to take a drink of rum, and felt such physical revulsion that he spat it back out.

When he got home, Osorio was determined to turn his life around. He reconciled with his father, with whom he had not spoken since he walked out at the family. He joined a Bible study group for young adults, and began taking courses in the faith. For the next eight years, Osorio worked hard at mastering the teachings, practices and traditions of the Catholic Church.

As part of that experience, Osorio went to Mexico for a formation program, where he had another brush with what he considers divine intervention.

“I was at an all-night vigil before the Blessed Sacrament when I heard a voice saying, ‘I need you,’” Osorio said. “At first, I thought it was the priest speaking, so I said, ‘What do you need?’ He just told me to be quiet. Then I closed my eyes and I heard the voice again, and I told the priest what had happened.”

The next morning, Osorio said, he expected the priest to explain the theological significance of the experience. Instead, he said, the priest simply told him: “Learn how to listen to God.”

When he returned to Honduras, Osorio said, he was still wrestling with the meaning of the experience. He told his wife and his spiritual director. In the end, he concluded he was being called to become a full-time lay preacher.

The only problem was that such a concept didn’t exist in Honduras at the time.

“My confessor went to the bishop to ask his permission and his advice,” Osorio recalled. “He said yes … but he didn’t say how!” For a husband struggling to support a wife and four children, this amounted to a fairly serious gap in the plan.

Eventually, Osorio said, a priest involved in the charismatic movement promised that his parish would support Osorio’s mission. So he began, a modern-day version of the medieval itinerant preachers: roaming from parish to parish, speaking to any audience that would have him. He was, in effect, a Catholic version of what the Pentecostals do so well … offering personal testimony about the awesome power of God to change lives.

To be clear, Osorio does not simply mimic the Pentecostal “pitch.” His message is unambiguously rooted in Catholic tradition – the sacraments, devotions, the office of the papacy, and a robust Catholic ecclesiology. Yet it’s delivered with the fire and the wit of the most animated “tent revival” preacher.

Osorio quickly built a following in Honduras. He helped to form “Schools of Evangelization” in Tegucigalpa, and before long he was teaching at the archdiocesan seminary.

By now, Osorio said, he has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people throughout Central and South America. His daily television audience reaches some four million Honduran homes, though it’s impossible to know how many are actually watching at any given time. He also feels the time has come for him to put his life story in the form of a book.

Honduras, once thought to be as much as 98 percent Catholic, reflects the Pentecostal explosion that has eaten into once-homogenous Catholic populations in much of Latin American. One common estimate is that Honduras today is 35 percent Protestant, most of that Pentecostal, and that eventually the population could be divided 50-50 between Protestants and Catholics.

Osorio says that the Pentecostal style of worship fits well with the “upbeat, effusive” character of Latin culture. He also says the Biblical language of the Pentecostals, their confidence that God’s miracles are happening today just as they happened in the time of the Scriptures, is deeply attractive to many people.

The greater openness within Catholicism to the charismatic movement, Osorio said, shows that the church “has learned from the Pentecostals.”

At the same time, Osorio believes that part of the faith formation his region needs is a “crash course” in apologetics, to equip Catholics to defend themselves against “attacks” from some currents within Pentecostalism.

“They say the Catholic church is a prostitute, that the pope is the anti-Christ,” Osorio said. “They say that we worship the pope and the Virgin Mary.”

Osorio said that “unfortunately,” such polemics sometimes lead Catholics away from the church. He said that the task of promoting a new apologetics is being picked up above all by the “movements,” such as the Neo-catechumenate, Cursillos, the Legion of Mary, and the Charismatic Renewal.

Osorio said he’s optimistic about the future of Honduran Catholicism, claiming that perhaps as many as thirty percent of Catholics today are active in the faith – which, if true, would represent an all-time high. Among the factors shaping that awakening, Osorio said, was John Paul II’s 2001 decision to make Rodriguez a cardinal, the first in Honduran history and an enormous source of national pride.

That said, Osorio insisted that the work of evangelization cannot depend just on clerical super-stars such as Rodriguez.

“It’s something that we laity must do,” he said. “We can’t sit back and wait to be led. We have to want it, to feel it, to burn to evangelize.”

Osorio is hoping the CELAM conference agrees.