I’ll always remember a Spanish-speaking woman I interviewed years ago when I was doing an article for the Houston Chronicle on why Catholic immigrants from Latin America switched over to Protestantism soon after they immigrated to the United States.
The answer, this woman told me, was the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and his radio broadcasts into Central and South America. “Before, we didn’t know we had a choice on who to believe,” is approximately what this woman told me. “But once we heard Jimmy Swaggart on the radio, we knew there was something else out there other than the Catholic Church.”
In the past 40 years, much of the population of Latin America has likewise realized they have faith options and a recent Wall Street Journal piece claims that this trend of mass conversions to Protestantism — and specifically Pentecostalism — has reached a tipping point.
This is news all of a sudden?
RIO DE JANEIRO—Tatiana Aparecida de Jesus used to walk the city’s streets as a sex worker, high on crack cocaine. Last year, the mother of five joined a small Pentecostal congregation in downtown Rio called Sanctification in the Lord and left her old life behind.
“The pastor hugged me without asking anything,” said Ms. de Jesus, 41, who was raised a Catholic and is one of more than a million Brazilians who have joined an evangelical or Pentecostal church since the beginning of the pandemic, according to researchers. “When you are poor, it makes so much of a difference when someone just says ‘good morning’ to you, ‘good afternoon,’ or shakes your hand,” she said.
This has been a huge advantage that the Protestants have pressed home.
These emerging Protestant flocks don’t have a shortage of priests as does the Catholic Church does –- where parishioner-to-clergy ratio mean there’s one priest per several thousand parishioners. Let’s keep reading:
For centuries, to be Latin American was to be Catholic; the religion faced virtually no competition. Today, Catholicism has lost adherents to other faiths in the region, especially Pentecostalism, and more recently to the ranks of the unchurched. The shift has continued under the first Latin American pope.
Seven countries in the region — Uruguay, the Dominican Republic and five in Central America — had a majority of non-Catholics in 2018, according to a survey by Latinobarómetro, a Chilean-based pollster. In a symbolic milestone, Brazil, which has the most Catholics of any country in the world, is expected to become minority-Catholic as soon as this year, according to estimates by academics that track religious affiliation.
That last sentence is the so-called “nut graph,” a journalistic term that signifies a phrase that sums up the article. There’s only one problem with that phrase. The journal only quotes one academic who is saying this. Thus, the story is on rather shaky legs.
I’m not doubting that Pentecostalism is surging in Latin America at the expense of the Catholics. Quite the opposite.
The problem is that this story doesn’t furnish the survey data to prove that everything is changing, somehow, in 2022. Journalists who have followed this trend know that there are major studies in recent decades that could add much-needed support for these conclusions.
This WSJ report does say this:
In Rio state, it has already happened. Catholics make up 46% of the population, according to the latest national census in 2010, and a little more than a third of some poverty-stricken favelas, or slums.
“The Vatican is losing the biggest Catholic country in the world—that’s a huge loss, an irreversible one,” said José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a leading Brazilian demographer and former professor at the national statistics agency. At the current rate, he estimates Catholics will account for fewer than 50% of all Brazilians by early July.
I expected the trio of reporters who wrote this piece to follow up with some hard figures on i.e. how many Catholics are converting to Pentecostalism per day, which would support the main assertion that July is the point of no return. All we have here is anecdotal evidence.
The news that Brazil is going Pentecostal is hardly new; the Pew Forum issued statistics in 2007 saying pretty much the same thing. For those of you under, say 50, the idea of Latin America going Pentecostal would not have occurred to any of us back in the 1970s and ‘80s as ever coming to pass. That section of the world was obviously never going to shift from Catholicism, or so we thought.
But like the woman I interviewed, once people found they had choices — thanks to Christian radio — they began making some. And a drop became a trickle became a stream became a river and finally a waterfall of people voting with their feet.
This article did mention charismatic Catholics as a bulwark against the Pentecostals and I would have liked to have seen more about them, such as whether their numbers are growing or stagnant. In the United States, the popular Catholic charismatic movement, which peaked in the 1970s, wasn’t enough to keep many Catholics from fleeing to nondenominational churches.
The piece lightly touched on the fact that Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff ever, has not been able to turn the tide. Back in 2013, when he was elected, it was thought a “Francis effect” might sway the masses. It did not.
The greater questions are: What is next? For instance, the lack of priests is strangling the Catholic Church, yet the hierarchy will not consider ordaining married men. Last year, as this BBC piece relates, the pope sidestepped a chance to bring married clergy into the Amazon, where Catholicism is cratering. It said in part:
In October last year, a synod of 184 bishops met at the Vatican to discuss the future of the Church in the Amazon. It was argued that older, married men should be allowed to become priests.
However, they would need to be men who are particularly well-respected and would preferably come from the indigenous communities where they intend to work.
It is estimated that at least 85% of villages in the Amazon are unable to celebrate Mass every week as a result of a shortage of priests. Some are said to only see a priest once a year.
Bishop Robert Flock of San Ignacio, a remote diocese in the Bolivian Amazon, told the BBC's Newshour: "The Pope simply kicked the can down the road. He doesn't even mention the recommendation of the possibility of married deacons being ordained as priests which was what the synod conclusions had suggested.
So the masses are heading toward Protestant churches where there’s a pastor at the ready to say hello. Of all the popes who could have introduced married clergy, Francis was the logical one. Now we’re reading new articles about how Catholicism is losing its grip in the world’s largest Catholic stronghold.
If this erosion is happening in Brazil, what’s happening elsewhere? The Vatican does say the Catholic Church is growing worldwide — except in Europe. With Brazil fading into the sunset, that sounds odd, but we do know it’s growing in Africa and Asia.
But will Pentecostals move in and make off with those new converts? Probably so, if you believe the reasons put forth by the Rev. Thomas Reese nearly four years ago in the National Catholic Reporter.
First, this:
One out of every 10 Americans is an ex-Catholic. If they were a separate denomination, they would be the third-largest denomination in the United States, after Catholics and Baptists. One of three people who were raised Catholic no longer identifies as Catholic.
Any other institution that lost one-third of its members would want to know why. But the U.S. bishops have never devoted any time at their national meetings to discussing the exodus. Nor have they spent a dime trying to find out why it is happening.
They sure weren’t discussing this at the latest U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meeting that I followed last November. The pandemic has not been kind to a lot of churches, including Catholic ones, yet no one was discussing church closings at the meeting.
The principal reasons given by people who leave the church to become Protestant are that their “spiritual needs were not being met” in the Catholic church (71 percent) and they “found a religion they like more” (70 percent). Eighty-one percent of respondents say they joined their new church because they enjoy the religious service and style of worship of their new faith.
In other words, the Catholic church has failed to deliver what people consider fundamental products of religion: spiritual sustenance and a good worship service. And before conservatives blame the new liturgy, only 11 percent of those leaving complained that Catholicism had drifted too far from traditional practices such as the Latin Mass.
People are not becoming Protestants because they disagree with specific Catholic teachings; people are leaving because the church does not meet their spiritual needs and they find Protestant worship service better.
Doubtless this is the same situation in Brazil. And the losses are going to continue mounting if this trend continues, which is why reporters might want to be looking to see how this is working out locally. Non-denominational churches, many of which are charismatic or Pentecostal, have been siphoning off Catholics — and others — since the late 1970s.
Last year, I interviewed religion scholar J. Gordon Melton (who now teaches at Baylor) and he casually mentioned how the Southern Baptists have lost 1 million people since the turn of the century and from what he could tell, many of those Baptists have become charismatics.
All this is anecdotal, and it’d take a huge research project to interview these former Baptists, but the idea is intriguing; Pentecostalism is punching holes in other boats besides the Catholic church.
But the Catholics are the canary in the mine. I was reading a Seattle-based blog about church closures in the city’s Capitol Hill section and noticed these statistics from the Archdiocese of Seattle.
The archdiocese, which spans Western Washington from Canada to Portland began a study in 2016 to evaluate a strategic plan for the region. Some of the statistics presented in that study paint a picture of a group with a steep drop in participation. From 1999-2018, the total population in Western Washington increased by 28.4%. Over than same time, the number of people attending a Catholic mass decreased by 15.5%.
Similarly, while total births increased by 17.2%, the number of Catholic baptisms dropped by 21.5%. And the number of marriages rose by 4.9%, while the number of Catholic marriages dropped by 49.5%.
Yes, I know our society is getting more secular but there are some churches that are growing despite that. These figures are sobering at best, particularly as Catholics are the largest religious group in the Pacific Northwest.
Forgive these cliches, but it’s time to smell the roses and read the tea leaves. The Catholic Church is in serious trouble across the country and in many parts of the world. Although we journalists like to report on the exceptions (crowded Latin Masses, for instance), let’s not ignore the main trend, sobering as it may be.
FIRST IMAGE: Brazil photo courtesy of Agustin Diaz Gargiulo on Unsplash.