{"id":2407,"date":"2007-03-23T09:15:25","date_gmt":"2007-03-23T09:15:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/preach-it-1.html"},"modified":"2007-03-23T09:15:25","modified_gmt":"2007-03-23T09:15:25","slug":"preach-it-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/preach-it-1.html","title":{"rendered":"Preach it"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen, on an answer to the Pentecostals in Honduras:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

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.<\/p>\n

Osorio, an articulate Honduran layman with a wife and four children, is a leader in the Catholic Charismatic movement in Central America. He\u2019s also a star of Channel 48, the Catholic television network in Honduras, where his compelling Bible-based preaching opens each morning\u2019s programming. <\/p>\n

In a Catholic culture without much tradition of lay activism, Osorio is a rare bird \u2013 a full-time lay preacher with a wide regional following. <\/p>\n

Part of Osorio\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Osorio laughs that a growing number of Pentecostals attend his retreats, some telling him afterwards: \u201cGreat preaching, brother \u2026 it\u2019s hard to believe you\u2019re Catholic!\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 conference of Latin America, in Brazil in May. It\u2019s based on aggressive grassroots evangelization, learning in some ways from what\u2019s worked for the Pentecostals, and led by passionate Catholic laity.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur current pastoral model is exhausted,\u201d said Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga of Honduras, in a March 20 interview with NCR<\/em> in Tegucigalpa. Like Osorio, Rodriguez favors a program of missionary outreach led by lay people, and rooted in Scripture.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe lost our people by the Word, and we have to recover them by the Word,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Osorio, 52, seems made to order for that mission.<\/p>\n

snip<\/em><\/p>\n

To be clear, Osorio does not simply mimic the Pentecostal \u201cpitch.\u201d His message is unambiguously rooted in Catholic tradition \u2013 the sacraments, devotions, the office of the papacy, and a robust Catholic ecclesiology. Yet it\u2019s delivered with the fire and the wit of the most animated \u201ctent revival\u201d preacher.<\/p>\n

Osorio quickly built a following in Honduras. He helped to form \u201cSchools of Evangelization\u201d in Tegucigalpa, and before long he was teaching at the archdiocesan seminary. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen, on an answer to the Pentecostals in 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPreach it - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/preach-it-1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Preach it - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Allen, on an answer to the Pentecostals in 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. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}