Leo XIV arrives in Uruguay today for a 12-day visit to the region, including his predecessor's Argentina and his own former mission nation of Peru.
It will be the first papal visit to Argentina since John Paul II. For some secret personal reason that has never been made clear, Francis was the first pope in centuries not to visit his own homeland (all the Italians before John Paul II obviously were in it, and John Paul II and Benedict XVI both included their nations among their first apostolic voyages). Leo XIV himself, a naturalized Peruvian, will already in this trip visit one of his homelands, and it should not take long for him to be back in his native United States.
In the decades following the last papal visits to Uruguay and Argentina, both nations have secularized so much they become pioneers of abortion in South America.
For this trip, we repost our text from earlier this year on the collapse of Catholicism in Latin America during the Bergoglio Pontificate:
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Catholicism has been in collapse in Latin America since the aftermath of Vatican II -- but it went into vertiginous tailspin in the pontificate of the Pope from Argentina.
We have often covered this in Rorate.
For instance, right after the election of Francis, in 2014, in the long post "THE COLLAPSE OF CATHOLICISM IN LATIN AMERICA:New Poll, Statistics, Tables and Graphs - Extensive Analysis", as well as in "The Latin American Exodus: Catholics become Protestants in Droves".
Now, the most credible research institute on religious trends, the Pew Research Center, has released a new study specifically dealing with the Bergoglian Pontificate: "Catholicism Has Declined in Latin America Over the Past Decade."
The results are nothing short of terrifying: during the Francis years, Catholicism became a minority religion in both Brazil (the largest nation in the region and the most populous Catholic country for decades) and in Chile, and declined everywhere. The collapse also accelerated in Francis' own Argentina, though it was not as steep in Leo XIV's adopted Peru.
One third of Brazilians are now Protestants -- and we know the collapse in Catholicism was not caused by a lack of faith: vast majorities still believe in God:
But, as Catholicism became identified with leftist ideologies and pagan practices (both indigenous and pseudo-African), the local bishops claimed to have a "preferential option for the poor" -- while the poor themselves opted for Protestantism.
