The decline of Catholicism in Latin America

How much Catholicism has changed since my childhood! In those days, everyone born in Latin America and South America was baptized, almost without exception, and within a few days of birth. And even if bloody persecutions in many of those countries tried to eradicate the religion the result was a stronger revival of the religious practice. 

The religious persecution in Mexico was clear proof that the martyrdom of Christians was the seed of a new Catholic spring. I will never forget the horrible sight of the corpses of three young priests hanged from wooden telegraph posts. The murdered priests had their rosaries in their hands and medals of Our Lady of Guadalupe around their necks. 

The decline of Catholicism in Latin America has been dramatic. Just fifty years ago, in 1970, South America was 92 per cent Catholic, and they lived out their lives as Catholics even though most of them were not regular church-goers. But, following the trend after half a century of precipitous decline, Latin America, currently home to 39 per cent of the world’s 1.3 billion faithful, will no longer be majority Catholic by 2030.

It was in this context that the cardinals elected Pope one of their confreres from South America in the hope that if Europe is lost, there might still be time to halt or even reverse the ecclesial hemorrhaging in the New World.

In South America, a landmark pew survey by a respected Chilean polling firm found the statistics down from 80 per cent in 1995 to 69 per cent in 2014. A new poll has revealed, however, that in his five years of papacy, the Argentinian Pontiff has been unable to staunch the bleeding. The percentage of Latin Americans has dropped by eight points since he was elected.

Unfortunately the survey doesn’t contain detailed data on each country polled. In the one nation for which there is more detail, Chile, the decline is even more dramatic. During Francis’s tenure, Chile has become a nation in which Catholics no longer constitute the majority of the population.

In 2013, this most prosperous country of the region was 56 per cent Catholic, and in the span of just four years the figure has dropped to 45 per cent, giving Chile the distinction of being the second South American nation, after Uruguay, to lose its Catholic majority.

If we go back to 1995, the benchmark year of the Latinobarómetro survey, Chile’s decline from 75 per cent Catholic to 45 per cent rates this as the fourth greatest drop in the region. Honduras leads, plummeting from 76 per cent Catholic to 37 per cent in the 22-year span. In fact, the violence-plagued Central American nation is the first country in the region in which Protestants, at 39 per cent, now outnumber Catholics by 2 per cent.

Returning to Chile, which the Pope has toured along with Peru, the new poll reveals that the greatly accelerated decline commenced with the sexual abuse scandal of Father Fernando Karadima who made headlines in 2010 with revelations of his chronic and serial molesting of minors. 

Other than Chile, the Latinobarómetro poll reveals that six other countries in the region are also no longer majority Catholic: Uruguay, the most secularized nation in Latin America, figures as the other South American country at 38 per cent Catholic, while Guatemala (43 per cent), El Salvador (40 per cent), Honduras (37 per cent), and Nicaragua (40 per cent) make for a Central American region that is no longer majority Catholic.

In the Caribbean, Cuba, after six decades of socialist dictatorship, is home to Latin America’s smallest Catholic population but was not included in the Chilean poll.

Returning to South America, Brazil, which is home to the largest Catholic population on earth (and also the largest Pentecostal community and second largest Protestant population), remains majority Catholic at 54 per cent. But not for much longer, as it has been predicted that Brazil will lose its Catholic majority by 2030.

Until the past decade the primary beneficiary of Catholic loss was Pentecostalism, as evidenced by Brazil now having a larger Pentecostal population than that of the U.S. where the dynamic branch of charismatic Protestantism was born a century ago.

After five decades of impressive growth, Pentecostalism has been able to claim some 70 per cent of all Latin American Protestants.

But the most significant new development in Latin America is the meteoric rise of the “religious nones,” those who don’t have any specific religious affiliation. The last Pew survey of 2014 reported a Latin American population of eight per cent nones, and in just three years that figure has more than doubled to 17 per cent.