Latin America: Inexorable Decline of the Catholic Church

Source: FSSPX News

A 286-page report, published by the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM), gives “an overview of the presence and the mission of the Catholic Church in the Latin American countries with the help of data, and analyses the evolution of this presence over the course of the last 50 years in order to identify its current principal strengths and the challenges it faces.”

The study, published in 2023, is composed of two parts: the first part is a comparative analysis of the current situation in the regions where the Church is spread—Central America and Mexico (Camex), the Caribbean and Antilles, the Bolivar or Andes region, and the Southern Cone. The second part presents the evolution of the Church’s mission in the region from 1970 to 2020.

The data for this work comes from the Pontifical Yearbook, an information source published annually by the Vatican. Supplementary data is provided by Latinobarómetro, such as the portion of the population that self-identifies as Catholic.

In the prologue, Jorge Eduardo Lozana, Secretary General of CELAM and Archbishop of San Juan de Cuyo (Argentina), writes: “The decrease in the number of baptisms and other sacraments, such as confirmations and marriages, raises questions of sacramentality in the countries of Latin America.

“The Church must take into account the cultural realities and social changes of Latin America and the Caribbean.” The report indicates that the number of annual baptisms went from 8,197,000 in 2000 to 5,135,000 in 2020. Confirmations and Catholic marriages also consistently decreased in the same period.

In the conclusion of the study, the authors advance in a purely sociological fashion: “It’s possible to conjecture that the number of Catholics in the region, considered on the basis of the number of baptisms administered each year, will decrease in the near future because of the conjunction of the two trends: the slowdown in demographic growth and the drop in the number of baptisms administered annually.”

A widespread weakening in Catholic affiliation seems “to indicate a loss of the Catholic Church’s influence in the Latin-American population, a distancing from the institution.”

Archbishop Lozano emphasizes that “the decrease in the number of seminarians poses challenges for the future concerning the number of priests and the pastoral care of communities. [...] Consecrated life, both masculine and feminine, has been an important pillar of the Church in Latin America, assuring a constant missionary presence and valued social service through its works.

“Yet, feminine religious life has decreased, which raises questions about the future of these works and the consequences for the most vulnerable communities.”

What the CELAM Report Does Not Say

A study produced by the Pew Research Center, titled Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region and published on November 13, 2014, revealed that the Catholic Church has begun to significantly decline since the 1970s, whereas evangelicals and the “unaffiliated” increased in the same time frame. (See DICI no. 307 of 12/19/2014.)

Ten years ago, the Catholic Church was already experiencing clear losses. In 2014, many Latin Americans joined evangelical Protestant denominations or rejected the Catholic religion. Nearly one in four Nicaraguans, one in five Brazilians, and one in seven Venezuelans are former Catholics. Nearly one in ten Latin Americans says they were raised Protestant.

And if nearly 4% of Latin Americans say they were raised without religion, 8% say they have no affiliation with any religion. A great portion of migrations from Catholicism to Protestantism in Latin America took place within a single lifetime.

The ex-Catholics who converted to Protestantism responded to questions about motives for their change. The most frequently cited reasons were the need of a more personal relationship with God and a different style of worship. Concerning questions on moral issues like abortion, relations outside of marriage, divorce, and same-sex marriage, the Latin American Catholics tend to be less conservative than the Protestants.

This is considered another motive for conversion, knowing that 60% of adults left the Catholic Church to find a denomination that prioritizes questions of morality. The Pew Research Center study additionally shows that, in almost all the countries studied, evangelicals say they go to Church more often and pray more frequently than Catholics.

The countries that appear the most Catholic are Mexico (81% Catholic and 9% Protestant) and Paraguay (89% Catholic and 7% Protestant). “In Latin America, Pentecostals pull millions of faithful away from the Catholic Church. But the Pope only has words of friendship for them. It is his way of practicing ecumenism...,” commented the Vaticanist Sandro Magister on November 19, 2014.

During a visit to his friend, evangelical pastor Giovanni Traettino, in Caserta on July 28, 2014, Francis gave a talk on his vision of ecumenism that the Italian Vaticanist presented as “a sort of universal Church having the appearance of a polyhedron of which the Catholic Church formed one of the sides, in equal measure with the other Churches and denominations.”

He clarifies: “We do not know very well how Francis reconciles this idea of his with what has been affirmed by the previous magisterium of the Church regarding ecumenism.”—What can we say, then, about a hypothetical continuity with Pius XI’s encyclical Mortalium animos (January 6, 1928), “On [True] Religious Unity”?