Pope Benedict XVI makes his first trip to the world’s most populous Roman Catholic country tomorrow, hoping his visit to Brazil will help to stem an exodus of the faithful to populist evangelical churches.

He told followers that he hoped his visit would provide a “stimulus to the disciples of Christ” in a country where Rome’s centuries-long hold over the population is threatened by the wildfire growth of charismatic Pentecostal movements.

When Pope John Paul II first visited Brazil in 1980, almost 90 per cent of Brazilians declared themselves Catholic. By 2000 this had fallen to 73 percent while the proportion who declared themselves “evangelicos” tripled.

The sudden emergence of the evangelical threat led Cardinal Cláudio Hummes, then archbishop of São Paulo and now Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome, to ask bishops in 2005: “We have to wonder – how long will Brazil remain a Catholic country?”

Pope Benedict’s five days in Brazil will be his first trip as pontiff to the Americas or the developing world.

Criticism that his focus on reversing the cataclysmic decline of Christianity in Europe comes at the expense of the wider church recently forced his spokesman to deny that Pope Benedict was “Eurocen-tric”.

Latin America is home to almost half of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics, with around 136 million in Brazil alone.

When in April 2005 the Church’s cardinals met to elect a new leader, most Brazilians had hoped that the new pope would be chosen from among their delegation. Cardinal Hummes was widely tipped by Vatican watchers as a possible successor to John Paul II.

That desire went unfulfilled; but the Polish pope’s German successor will likely receive a warm welcome in Brazil, especially as the biggest public mass of the visit will have as its centrepiece the canonisation of the first Brazilian-born saint, Friar Antônio Galvão who died in 1822. The mass in the city of São Paulo is expected to attract more than a million people.

Pope Benedict’s other main order of business is the opening of a conference of Catholic bishops from Latin America and the Caribbean at the Marian shrine of Aparecida. Half-a-million believers are expected to crowd into this pilgrimage site which boasts the world’s second largest church.

The bishops’ conference is expected to discuss the threat from evangelical movements across the continent as well as attempts to loosen Latin America’s strict antiabortion laws, highlighted by Mexico City’s recent vote to legalise the procedure.

Many Brazilian Catholic activists may find an irony in Pope Benedict’s concern over the rise of evangelicals, as they say his campaigns against Liberation Theology, an influential movement in Latin America that argued that the church should actively involve itself in the struggle for social justice, is partly to blame for the growth of the new protestant churches.

As Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict led Vatican efforts to eradicate the movement, saying it was infected by Marxism. In the 1980s he silenced Brazil’s leading theologian Leonardo Boff, who left the Church.

Mr Boff, still an influential thinker, said that Cardinal Ratzinger’s doctrinal campaign had left the Brazilian Church inward looking and isolated from the faithful.