“The Catholic Church opted for the poor and the poor opted for the Pentecostals”: Why the first Latin American pope is losing his flock
Latin America and the Caribbean is home to 41% of the world’s Catholics, according to the Vatican. Estimates of how many Latin Americans remain Catholic vary, but all sides agree the percentages are falling. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 69% of Latin Americans were Catholic in 2014, though 84% had been raised in the church. Nineteen percent of Latin Americans identified themselves as Protestants. Of those, 65% identified with Pentecostalism.
Latin America’s religious transformation began with independence from Spain and Portugal in the 19th century, after which Catholicism, which had come with colonization starting in the 16th century, ceased to be the state religion. The church retained a privileged legal position in many countries and it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that competing faiths began to grow.
For Jaime Martins, a 45-year-old lawyer from Rio de Janeiro, the turning point came in 2016, when Brazil’s economic crash left him penniless, sending him into a downward spiral of depression and addiction. His wife left him, he got into trouble with the police, and he took to wandering across the city’s highways at night. “I wanted to get run over.”
Evangelicals tend to be more engaged—60% of those interviewed in a 2007 study in Brazil said they go to church more than once a week, compared with only 16% among Catholics. Many Pentecostals preach the “theology of prosperity”—more commonly known in the U.S. as the Prosperity Gospel—which holds that God’s grace is reflected in material wealth. At Solomon’s Temple in São Paulo, suited men regularly line up at the altar with velvet red sacks and credit-card machines to receive offerings as the pastor promises his followers that they too will get rich if they donate generously.
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