 Then in 2007, with Pentecostal and Evangelical movements threatening the faith of Catholics within the impoverished peripheries of Latin America’s mega-cities, these bishops at the Fifth Episcopal Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean ("Council of Aparecida") embraced the base communities as a pastoral model.A decline in base communities in some parts of Latin America has been attributed to Pope John Paul II's appointment of more conservative bishops and his difficulty in understanding the complexities of liberation theology.The Argentine-born Pope Francis’s message "often has stood in marked contrast to the words of his two predecessors.