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Good morning... In Britain people have called football the national religion; in Brazil it seems to be the other way round. Many of their best players are devout, and like to demonstrate that fact in front of their fans. At one point, Fifa had to ask them to tone it down. Those who are Pentecostalists belong to a branch of Protestant Christianity which is growing fast in Brazil. Some of them advocate what has been called the Gospel of Success, or Gospel of Prosperity. Work hard, live a clean life, praise Jesus and give him thanks on all occasions, and God will reward you with success. It's a simple creed and it appears to work, on and off the football field - at least some of the time. But other Pentecostalists think it is not true to the Bible - off-side, you might say. There's an interesting history behind all this. Pentecostalism, originally imported from the United States, seemed to offer what Catholicism didn't, namely a way out of the favelas - the slums or shanty towns where very poor people live, often next door to the very rich. The Catholic Church's answer, in so far as it had one, was to call for structural change, starting with the departure of the right-wing military dictatorships which had plagued Latin America for a generation. The left-wing Archbishop of Sao Paulo for nearly thirty years, Cardinal Paulo Arns, was a leading advocate of the so-called theology of liberation. He was a brave opponent of the regime's use of torture to subdue its enemies, and he even sold his palace to build a welfare centre for the poor. All this set him at odds not just with conservative Brazilian Catholics who were hand-in-glove with the powers-that-be, but with the Vatican itself, which was alarmed by the way liberation theologians seemed to be turning Marxist. So efforts were made to stamp it out, which seemed for a while to have succeeded. In the view of Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict, it was the Church's concentration on the political rather than the personal which drove many Catholics into the arms of the new Pentecostal movements. Relations between these two varieties of Christianity in Brazil are still uneasy, but they get along well enough on the football field. Look for players making the sign of the cross, for instance before a penalty or after a goal. They are the Catholics. Look for those who kneel to pray, and maybe try to display some undergarment with the word "Jesus" written prominently on it. They are the Pentecostalists. Whose side God is on I can't tell you, except to say he probably has more sympathy for the losers than the winners. As for liberation theology - thanks to the arrival of the first Latin American Pope, it's now back in fashion. Just to show, which may be some comfort to England fans, that where God's concerned, there's no such thing as a lost cause.