With his hands clutched to his heart and his head nodding with concern and understanding, Marcelo Rossi at first glance seems a stereotypical Catholic priest. Yet behind the mild manners, the tall, athletic preacher is arguably one of Brazil's most influential men.
Controlling the minds and hearts of millions, Fr Rossi, aged 36, is the envy of politicians and advertisers alike. He holds his sermons in warehouses to accommodate his huge flock; his CDs have sold more at home than any other Brazilian artist's; and weekly radio and television broadcasts bring his songs, dance and prayer to millions of Brazilians.
Fr Rossi is a frontline soldier in the Vatican's battle to roll back an Evangelical incursion in the world's largest Catholic country. While the number of Catholics has remained virtually unchanged at 125m, Evangelists doubled to 26m during the 1990s. Protestant gains have been aided by a large empire of television and radio stations, newspapers and publishing houses.
The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, for instance, owns Rede Record, a nationwide television network with 90 broadcasters.
Fr Rossi is now firing back with the same lively, participative sermons he copied from the Evangelists, and is using all the modern marketing and propaganda weapons available. He has led aerobics classes while preaching, and was the first priest to hold mass on the internet.
"The Evangelists are in the media, and we also need to be there. It took the [Catholic] church a decade but it finally woke up," Fr Rossi told the FT in an interview this week.
"In 1997, I and 300 other young priests promised the Pope to go out and evangelise with all possible means of communication," Fr Rossi adds.
"Rossi sells the emotion of religion," says Diler Trindade, the producer of Fr Rossi's latest media venture - a movie about the Virgin Mary that premieres on Friday.
Maria: Mother of the Son of God promises to be a blockbuster success. Even Geraldo Alckmin, the powerful São Paulo governor, was left tearful after seeing an advance screening. Few politicians with any electoral ambitions dare to antagonise Fr Rossi.
With a budget of R$6.3m ($2.2m) and a distribution contract with Columbia Pictures, the movie has the kind of financial support most Brazilian movie directors can only dream of.
In January he is scheduled to personally deliver the movie to the Pope: "I will have kept my promise," Fr Rossi says.
Fr Rossi's own participation was essential to drawing crowds, so the priest will narrate and play the role of the angel Gabriel.
Too much publicity for a priest? "That is my mission," he replies "It won't go to my head because I know I am nobody. I'm just an instrument [of God]."
Columbia expects to sell at least 2m tickets in Brazil, and many more in the heavily Catholic Spanish-speaking world. But selling religion is also good business for the church, and the movie is only one of a host of products.
"I am not interested in business. My main objective is to evangelise," Fr Rossi insists. "Many say they are Catholic but aren't; may this movie save them."
He appears well versed in the movie's feasibility study. Given the topic of the movie, "we can show this on Mother's day, Children's day, Christmas, and Easter - it won't go out of style", he says.
With the help of large donors, many from the US, his Evangelist counterparts have built up not only a huge media empire - it includes 94 television stations compared with three Catholic broadcasters - but also boast 55 deputies in the lower house of congress.
José Alencar, vice-president, belongs to the Liberal party, whose principal leader is Bishop Carlos Rodrigues of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.
"The [Catholic] church should be nonpartisan but we seriously need to rethink our role," Fr Rossi says. "The Evangelist faction in congress is growing fast."
Yet even within Catholicism, Fr Rossi belongs to a sort of "third way" in the Brazilian church, advocating a modern presentation of the traditional gospel.
Fr Rossi's wing differs from the conservatives' and from proponents of "liberation theology" - social and political activism on behalf of the underprivileged. Some of the leaders of the latter movement have ties with the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his leftwing Worker's party.
Here Fr Rossi treads more carefully. "I'm not against liberation theology as long as it maintains a certain equilibrium, including more prayer."