Vatican City, Oct 16, 2008 / 09:58 am
Archbishop Walmor Oliveira de Azevedo of Belo Horizonte in Brazil said this Monday during the Synod of Bishops that religious sects continue to pose a challenge, saying that if Catholics abandon the Church to join a sect it is “because they do not encounter God in her.”
During his intervention at the Synod, the Brazilian bishop said, “Often the simple people who leave our Church do not do so because of what non-Catholic groups believe, but fundamentally because of how they live out that membership, not for dogmatic reasons, but pastoral ones, not for theological problems, but because of the methods within our Church.”