Roman Catholic head, Pope Benedict XVI, has ended his visit to Brazil at the weekend with an address in which he condemned the growing divide between rich and poor in the Latin American region.

|PIC1|Brazil is the world's most populous Roman Catholic nation in the world, although the country and the entire Latin American region has experienced a downturn in followers over recent years, losing millions to the growing evangelical Christian faith.

The Pope addressed these concerns for his Church, urging Latin American bishops to do more to confront challenges threatening the Roman Catholic Church.

The rallying call comes at the end a five-day visit to the South American country, which Pope Benedict hopes will revive the Catholic Church there.

Sunday saw the Pope lead about 150,000 people in a traditional Catholic mass outside the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida. Despite the huge number who gathered, the figure is far less than the 500,000 people church officials had expected, revealing the troubling times the Church is facing.

Estimates indicate that more than 60 per cent of Brazilians belong to the Roman Catholic Church, although it is also estimated that the Church has lost around 10 per cent of its membership over the past decade.

Despite the decline, Brazil remains home to approximately half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics.

Closing his visit, Pope Benedict commented that both Marxism and capitalism had done great harm in Latin America, and that people were losing their dignity through "drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness".

The speech also opened a two-week conference of bishops from across the region. Benedict stated: "The peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean have the right to a full life, proper to the children of God, under conditions that are human, free from the threat of hunger and from every form of violence."