ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE — Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday he supported excommunication for politicians who backed Mexico City’s decision to legalize abortion, giving a strong message about core church teachings at the start of his first trip to Latin America as pontiff. Church teaching calls for automatic excommunication for anyone who has an abortion. In Mexico City, where abortion was legalized during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, church officials have said that doctors and nurses who performed the procedure, as well as lawmakers who supported its legalization, would also be excommunicated. ‘It’s nothing new, it’s normal, it wasn’t arbitrary. It is what is foreseen by the church’s doctrine,’ Benedict told reporters aboard a plane to Brazil. Benedict, in his first full-fledged news conference as pope, also said the exodus Catholics for evangelical Protestant churches in Latin America was ‘our biggest worry.’ But he said the spread of Protestantism showed that there was a ‘thirst for God’ in the region and that he intended to lay down a strategy to answer that call when he meets with bishops from throughout Latin America in a once-a-decade meeting in the shrine city of Aparecida near Sao Paulo. […]