'Eurocentric' pope hopes to win back Latin American pilgrims

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Benedict XVI sets off for Mexico and Cuba this week, hoping to win over followers in a region with the largest concentration of Catholics, but where some critics say he has neglected them.

While the pope has visited South America just once, when he met with Latin American bishops in Brazil in 2007, 16 of his 22 trips abroad have been to Europe - much to the chagrin of the faithful across the Atlantic.

This trip, his first to Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, is "the pope's debt payment to Latin America," Mexican cardinal Juan Sandoval told the Informador newspaper in an interview this month.

The 84-year-old pontiff's pontificate has largely focused on re-evangelising an increasingly secularised Europe.

But that has led some critics to accuse him of neglecting Latin America, which has also seen a decline in Catholicism.

Adding fuel to the fire, when Benedict XVI appointed 22 new cardinals in February, 16 Europeans, two Americans, a Canadian - Brazilian Joao Braz de Aviz, the only one chosen from Latin America.

"Is the pope eurocentric? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. He did appoint a number of European cardinals" said Sandoval, Guadalajara's Archbishop emeritus.

The pope's previous trip to Latin American was marred by controversy.

The pontiff sparked anger across the region during his trip to Brazil when he said American Indians had been 'silently longing' to convert to Christianity 500 years ago - and made no mention of the atrocities committed against them.

He tried to limit the damage in comments two weeks later, when he said that memories of the Church's 'glorious past' in Latin America could not 'erase the suffering and injustices inflicted by Europeans colonisers on native populations'.

The pope will visit Mexico on March 23, before going on to Cuba, where he will celebrate mass in the same square visited in 1998 by his charismatic predecessor, John Paul II. It was John Paul who helped persuade the communist Cuban regime to open up to the world.

While the Church is very socially active in Latin America, a number of conservative prelates have been appointed during the pontificates of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

That has strained relations with the region's more radical liberation theologians.

In February, the Vatican fell out with the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) when it insisted the institution either fall into line with the conservative archbishop of Lima, or stop referring to itself as 'pontifical'.

Students staff were outraged at the ultimatum, which gave the university until April to comply with the Vatican's wishes.

"Europe should go back to showing a more fraternal attitude towards other continents and stop looking down on the others," the new Brazilian cardinal Braz de Aviz said in an interview with the news agency I.Media in February.

"How much longer are we going to be led by Europe and the United States? You can no longer think that Latin America, Asia and Africa haven't changed, that they are still colonies or the Third World," he said.