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Marcelo Mendonça Rossi is a Brazilian Catholic priest widely known and popular in the country for his novel approaches to ministering to the faithful. He is a singer and uses music intensely in his masses, has recorded several music CDs, is a host to several radio and TV programs in many stations, has appeared as an actor in two movies with religious themes. All of them have been big hits in the media, but Father Rossi donates all the proceedings to Catholic charities and to his own parish.
Father Rossi is based in São Paulo city, where he was born and studied. He preaches at the Santuário do Terço Bizantino to enormous and enthusiastic crowds, and has promoted the use of the so-called Byzantine rosary for praying. One of his masses, celebrated at soccer stadium, had more than 70,000 attendees.
Father Rossi has been very important for the Catholic Charismatic Renewal movement in the Catholic Church in Brazil, which has lost in the last decades a significant number of adherents to the Protestant Evangelical churches. By adopting some of the charismatic features of these churches, Father Rossi and his acolytes have been able to win back or at least to retain a part of his brethren. Traditional Catholics in Brazil, however, do not always approve these changes; Odilo Cardinal Scherer, the Archbishop of São Paulo and thus Rossi's direct superior, stated in reference to Rossi that "Priests aren't showmen... The Mass is not to be transformed into a show".
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