Why the first Latin American pope couldn't win back Latin America

Washington Post

22-04-2025

RIO DE JANEIRO — Several months after he assumed leadership of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis made his first trip overseas. It was back home to Latin America, where the Argentine pontiff celebrated mass before a crowd of 3 million people on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach.
The message that day seemed clear: Latin America, which was home to about 4 in 10 of the world's Catholics, would be central to his papacy. By selecting Jorge Bergoglio as its first Latin American pope, the church hoped to strengthen Catholicism in a region where it was increasingly losing ground to other Christian denominations.
The bet never fully paid off.
During Francis's papacy, evangelical Protestantism and secularism continued to remake the continent's religious geography, especially in Brazil, long considered the world's most Catholic nation. The share of Catholics here has shrunk from 65 percent to an estimated 50 percent over the past decade, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Within the next 10 years, researchers predict, evangelicals are expected to eclipse Catholics.
'He didn't stall the decline,' said José Eustáquio Diniz Alves, a Brazilian demographer.
The region remains vitally important for the church: 27 percent of the world's Catholics reside in South America and nearly 14 percent in Central America, according to the latest Vatican statistics. But Francis's inability to reverse long-standing religious trends in Latin America despite his heritage and personal history underscores the challenges faced by Catholicism in a region where more than 90 percent of people once considered themselves Catholic — and which was once viewed as the future of the Church.
'Nobody ended up becoming Catholic because of Pope Francis,' said Rodrigo Toniol, a former president of the Latin American Association of Social Sciences of Religion. 'Nobody continued to be Catholic because of Pope Francis. And no one stopped being Catholic because of Pope Francis.'
The polling firm Latinobarómetro found that across Latin America the number of people who identify as Catholic dropped from 70 percent in 2010 to 57 percent in 2020. Now some Catholic leaders appear to be abandoning the notion that the strength of the church should be measured by the number of people in the pews.
'Whoever lives the Gospel from the cross and the Resurrection does not fear the decrease in numbers," the Primada de México Archdiocese said in a statement Sunday. "Because he knows that the essential thing is to remain in Christ.'
In retrospect, religious scholars said, believing an entire region's religious trajectory could be changed by a single person, no matter how charismatic or influential, was always a misunderstanding of the complexities of Catholicism in Latin America. Imported from Europe and used as an instrument of colonization, Catholicism here has always felt removed from the church's organizational structure in Rome.
'A lot of prayer, few masses,' goes the popular saying in Brazil. 'A lot of saints, few priests.'
That cultural and geographic distance from Rome diminishes the impact of any one pope, Toniol said.
'Here, the pope is as distant as a point of reference as the president of the United States,' he said. 'What the pope says and does, for both good and bad, is seen as the same as the actions of any other global leader.'
A 2014 Pew Research survey on Latin American religion found overwhelming popularity for the pope among Catholics. They viewed him as a transformative figure. But former Catholics — who largely told Pew that they had left the church to find a closer connection to God — said they weren't impressed. The only countries where a majority of former Catholics viewed Francis favorably were Uruguay and his native Argentina.
Francis was always a divisive figure among a certain sector of Argentines who associated him with the Peronist political movement. And even his most devoted fans were disappointed that he never returned to Argentina for a papal visit. At the Buenos Aires basilica where Bergoglio once presided, 94-year-old Arminda Ester Aragón, a former friend and neighbor of the promising young priest, acknowledged that the church here is not what it once was.
But Francis leaves behind a vision of Catholicism that 'reaches out, a church that doesn't just stay in the parish," she said. 'He transmitted the joy of the faith. The hope.'
Marina Lauritsen, a 56-year-old teacher and mother of two who also attends Francis's former church, said his legacy is one of openness, citing his outreach to people of other faiths and to the LGBTQ+ community. 'It doesn't mean I'm in favor of that or not, but we have to recognize that they must be included,' she said.
The pope's rhetoric, and his history working with the poor and the marginalized, often echoed liberation theology — a Latin American religious movement that rose in the 1960s in response to the region's extraordinary inequality and called for emancipation from all forms of oppression, both social and economic.
Previous popes tried to stamp out liberation theology, seen by conservative Catholics as a revolutionary creed. But Francis embraced several of its prominent theologians, including Peru's Gustavo Gutiérrez and Brazil's Leonardo Boff.
'Pope John II and Pope Benedict, they persecuted these communities that are so strong in Latin America,' said Jeferson Batista, an anthropologist at the University of Campinas. 'But Pope Francis, precisely because he was Latino and knew this reality, he made a moral and theological rehabilitation with these leaders.'
But Francis remained firm on key aspects of church dogma, including the role of women and the ban on marriage among priests. Such rigid traditionalism, religious scholars said, has helped fan a fever of religious conversion in Latin America, where priests often complain they struggle to compete with nimbler forms of Christianity.
It takes years of study to become a priest. To become an evangelical pastor, it just takes a Bible.
An emblematic moment came in 2019, at the Amazon synod in Rome. One of its central questions was the plummeting numbers of Catholics and the rapid rise of neo-Pentecostalism. The region was so vast, and the priest shortage so acute, that many communities were going a full year between masses. A group of clergy from the Amazon proposed reform: Extend the priesthood to certain married men and widen the reach of the cloth.
It had seemed the church was on the precipice of a major reform, but Francis demurred.
'He didn't get involved in areas where there wasn't consensus to get involved,' Filipe Domingues, an expert on the Vatican at the Gregorian Pontifical University in Rome. 'He thought things needed to mature more.'
His lack of urgency disappointed many Brazilian Catholics. In the Amazon, hundreds of river villages are flipping from Catholic to evangelical. Demographers suspect the losses are even more severe among Indigenous communities: Diniz Alves said he expected the latest census to show a majority of Indigenous Brazilians are already evangelical.
Diego Mauro, an Argentine historian with a focus on the Catholic Church, argued that Francis did not set out to reverse Catholicism's global decline, but rather to 'coexist with it' — to teach respect for other religions and acceptance for those who find other paths to God.
'Francis had a greater impact outside of the Catholic Church than within it,' Mauro said.
For an institution that has endured for 2,000 years, that usually thinks in centuries rather than years, it is still too early to draw any definite conclusions about Francis's impact in Latin America, said Batista, the anthropologist. He noted there are hints of change among church members, if not within the church itself.
When Francis arrived, Brazil had six LGBTQ+ Catholic groups. Now there are 23.
'The future of the Catholic Church will be defined by the next pope,' he said. 'Francis laid the groundwork, and if the next pope goes along the same line, a new construction would be possible. But if the Roman Curia thinks he did too much, then we'll take a step back.'
Dias reported from Brasilia and Schmidt reported from Bogotá, Colombia. Gabriela María Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report.