Last week, The New York Times reported that Pope Francis had “open[ed] the door to limited ordination of married men as priests.” Specifically, in trying to meet the pastoral needs of the Pan-Amazon region, including remote communities in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela, the Vatican mentioned in a planning document that the Church may start ordaining married or elderly viri probati, the Latin term for men of proven character. “It is the kind of exception to the celibacy requirement that church experts say—and church traditionalists worry—could be a step toward the ordination of married men in other areas of the world,” reporter Jason Horowitz wrote.

Any move to chip away at clerical celibacy, mandated since the twelfth century, is potentially a major step in the Church’s history. It’s also another source of controversy for a pontiff who has attracted both praise and condemnation for his efforts to make Catholicism a more welcoming and accommodating faith. Given the likely pushback and its potentially momentous implications, one might wonder why Pope Francis decided to compromise on this mainstay of canon law merely to reach a little further into the sparsely populated Latin American rainforest. While early coverage made much of the move as a way to help the Catholic Church compete with evangelical Protestantism, the shift arguably has as much to do with the needs of underserved individuals in remote areas, as well as broader theological points Pope Francis has made about protecting the environment, and the Amazon in particular. All three reasons have political implications—something Francis is uniquely equipped to appreciate.

Francis, as the first pope to hail from Latin America, is intimately familiar with the challenges the Church faces on that continent, including the urgent task of defending against an ongoing evangelical and Pentecostal onslaught, the driving forces of a Protestant wave that has made deep inroads across the region in recent decades. Brazil, for example, remains the most populous majority-Catholic country in the world. But while 91.8 percent of Brazilians identified as Catholic in 1970, by 2010 that number had fallen to 64.6, with a loss of about 1.7 million followers in the last decade alone, according to the most recent census. Self-proclaimed evangelicals have jumped from a 6.6 percent of the population in 1980 to 22.2 percent of the population in 2010.

That explosive evangelical growth has transformed the country’s politics, favoring an increasingly moralistic and fervent right wing. Protestant churches have seen their most rapid growth in poor communities, areas once attended to by grassroots Catholic associations called Ecclesiastical Base Communities that aimed to teach residents how the emancipating spirit of the gospel could be applied to the reality of their lives. This kind of engaged piety, turning religious conviction into communitarian action, is widely seen as one of the most important progressive innovations of the Catholic Church in Latin America.

Pope Francis was ordained in 1969, a time of leftist insurrection and religious effervescence across the continent, spurred by the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), or Vatican II, an ecumenical meeting convened by Pope John XXIII to reassess and reassert the role of the Catholic Church in a world drastically reshaped by World War II. The idea that the Vatican, with its doctrine of papal infallibility, would invite open debate about official religious doctrine shocked religious and irreligious people around the world. The council summoned between 2,000 and 2,500 bishops and thousands of observers, auditors, sisters, laymen, and laywomen to four sessions at St. Peter’s Basilica over three years—an unprecedented level of openness driven by clear reformist zeal.