Pope Benedict last night ended his trip to Brazil by condemning the growing gap between rich and poor in Latin America.
The Pope also urged Latin American bishops to do more to confront challenges threatening the Roman Catholic Church, including the defection of millions of followers to Protestant churches.
Pope Benedict
His call to action came at the end of a five-day visit to Brazil, where he tried to revive the church's waning influence in Latin America.
Earlier yesterday, the Pope led about 150,000 people in a traditional mass outside the huge Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida in this holy shrine city.
The turnout was far less than the 500,000 people expected by church officials - an indication of the difficult times it faces in the world's largest Catholic nation.
The Pope said both Marxism and capitalism had done great harm in Latin America, home to nearly half of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics, and that people were losing their dignity through "drugs, alcohol and deceptive illusions of happiness.
"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," he said.
The Pope, who led a Vatican crackdown on the Liberation Theology movement of left-wing priests in the 1980s, said Marxist systems had brought destruction on economies, the environment and the human spirit.