On the occasion of the papal visit to three South American nations this week, the Chile-based research institution Latinobarómetro has just released its newest numbers on Catholicism in Latin America.
The news is grim: under Francis, Brazil, the largest nation in the region, and long the one with the largest Catholic population in the world, has at last achieved what was inevitable following the post-conciliar collapse. Now, just a plurality of Brazilians are self-declared Catholics (46% of the population), and the fall has reached other nations as well: in three nations, there is now a plurality of Evangelicals (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). In the recently-visited Uruguay, nearly half of the population is irreligious. But in the region as a whole the numbers seem to have stabilized.
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