The Catholics preferred the poor, but the poor preferred the Pentecostals, as the saying goes.

"Wallowed in their personal relationship with Jesus"?!  Yikes. I guess you know better what the poor need than they do...maybe if Catholics stuck with preaching Catholicism instead of liberation theology, it wouldn't have left a vacuum for the Protestants to focus on the spiritual side the poor people's yearnings? Liberation theology doesn't inspire the poor in the manner the Christianity of the evangelicals does. When the Catholics focus too much on the material and not enough on the spiritual, people go elsewhere.