Pope Warns Latin America Against Marx

Pope Benedict XVI attacked Marxism and unfettered capitalism as twin scourges of Latin America at the end of a trip to Brazil, a visit which has underlined but failed to reverse the Catholic church's waning influence in the region.

The pontiff gave a blunt warning to priests to steer clear of leftwing politics, singling out communism as a baleful force. "The Marxist system, where it found its way into government, not only left a sad heritage of economic and ecological destruction, but also a painful destruction of the human spirit," he said on Sunday before his return to Rome.

The comments echoed the campaign he waged against liberation theologians and politically aligned clerical champions of social justice when he was cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, a conservative Vatican enforcer under Pope John Paul II.

A so-called pink tide has brought leftwing governments to power across the region, with Venezuela using its oil wealth to support them, but the 80-year-old Pope did not identify which countries he may have had in mind.

Willian Lara, Venezuela's information minister, said the comments should not be construed as criticism of president Hugo Chávez's socialist zeal. "We all know that the current Pope is characterised as a conservative man, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we must automatically think that any word he utters is against Venezuela."

At the end of his five-day tour, his first to the Americas since becoming Pope two years ago, Benedict also condemned unbridled capitalism and globalisation for degrading personal dignity through drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness. Legalised abortion and contraception threatened the "future of the peoples", he said.

The German pontiff also waded into a fraught debate by challenging the view that the Catholic church shared responsibility with the conquistadors for the bloody destruction of indigenous cultures. Latin America's indigenous population had been "silently longing" to become Christians when Europeans started colonising the continent 500 years ago, he said.