(January 14, 2022 at 12:45 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: Is Catholicism in Latin America set to become a minority faith?
Latin America for centuries has been a bastion for the Catholic church, accounting until recently for more than 40 percent of the global Catholic population. Yet the Vatican's hold over the continent is slowly and inexorably sliding.
Up until the 1960s, data indicates that 90 percent of Latin Americans identified as Catholics. However, by 2014 only 69 percent identified as Catholics, and the trend is downwards.
According to studies carried out by Latinobarometro, a local polling company that carries annual surveys across Latin America, by 2017, the number of those identifying as Catholic had dropped to 59 percent. And those numbers may already be out of date, painting a picture of a region that is set to become minority Catholic if it's not already.
The trend, however, amongst different countries is not equally even.
In places like Chile, trust in the Catholic Church has dropped from 72 percent in 1995 to 31 percent in 2020.
According to Latinobarometro, Chile is one of the most agnostic countries in the world, at 35 percent, and now around 45 percent of the population identifies as Catholic compared to 70 percent 15 years ago.
At the beginning of the 20th century, El Salvador was almost 100 percent Catholic, today, it teeters on half of the population.
While the Catholic church has been split down the middle between reformists and conservatives over the future direction of the church and debates concerning female priestesses and whether male priests should remain celibate - Evangelical Christians have been on the march.
These Evangelical churches have also been keen to showcase and promote materialism as a sign of God's love, provided they contribute handsomely to their respective churches.
The wealth these pastors have garnered from running their churches runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. It has also become a divine sign of God's favour when some of the Evangelical pastors have bought private jets.
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/is-cat...53587/amp/
When I worked for a while at a big Baptist church in Dallas, I noticed how hard they worked to outreach to the Latin population here. They supported churches in areas that mostly served Mexican and Central American people.
I had to shake my head watching the ultra-wealthy, mostly oil money rich, people of Dallas feel good about how many Latin men the church employed. I suppose they didn't see the similarity to a company store.
“If you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” — Confucius