As Pope Francis prepared to fly to Brazil for World Youth Day, a new study showed that the proportion of Catholics in the country — which has the world’s largest Catholic population — has dropped steadily in recent decades.
With Catholicism losing ground especially among the young and city-dwellers, only 46 per cent of the population of Rio de Janeiro — the city that will host the Pope — now identifies as Catholic.
“Between 1970 and 2000, the share of the population that identifies as Catholic fell even though the number of Catholics in the country rose,” said the report from the Pew Research Center.
“But in the most recent decade, from 2000 to 2010, both the absolute number and the percentage of Catholics declined. Brazil’s Catholic population fell slightly from 125 million in 2000 to 123 million a decade later, dropping from 74 per cent to 65 per cent of the country’s total population.”
The report shows that the Catholic Church has been challenged by the continuing ascent of Protestant churches, particularly the fast-growing Pentecostal denominations, an accelerating secularism and religious indifference, and even a rise in “spiritism”.
Between 1970 and 2010 the number of Brazilians with no religious affiliation jumped from less than 1 million to 15 million.
Pew researchers found that the number of Brazilian Protestants, conversely, continued to grow in the most recent decade, rising from 26 million in 2000 to 42 million (22 per cent of the population) in 2010.
Membership of Pentecostal churches more than doubled between 1991 and 2010.
Pew said the main factor in the growth of Protestantism in Brazil appeared to be religious switching, or movement from one religious group to another. A 2006 Pew survey of Brazilian Pentecostals suggested that 45 per cent had converted from Catholicism.
Catholicism has been the country’s dominant religious tradition since the era of Portuguese colonisation in the 16th century.
Brazil has about 400 Catholic bishops, nearly 11,000 parishes and about 13,000 diocesan priests. There are roughly 483,000 catechists and 11,500 seminarians.
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Image: Urban Christian News