The Church in Latin America

From the Río Grande to Tierra del Fuego: nearly 585 million baptized

Catholic Latin America is not just another mosaic: it alone represents more than 40% of the world's Catholic population. According to the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae — official statistical directory of the Holy See — 47.7% of the world's Catholics reside on the American continent (North, Central, South America, Caribbean) in 2024 — 2024 edition (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2026; 47.8% in the previous edition, 2023 data); 27.4% of the world's Catholics reside in South America, plus those of Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean (13.8%, 2023 data — last published sub-regional breakdown) — so that Latin America gathers in total about 41% of the planet's Catholics, or nearly 585 million baptized^[7][8].

Brazil alone, with approximately 182 million baptized out of 215 million inhabitants, accounts for 13% of world Catholicism — more than Germany, France, Italy and Spain combined. Since the 19th century, it has been the world's largest Catholic country^[9]. Mexico follows with approximately 100 million Catholics, then come Colombia, Argentina and Peru, each with several tens of millions of faithful^[10].

Brazil, Catholic giant of the world

This Brazilian prominence was built over five centuries. Evangelized by the Portuguese from the 16th century, in particular by the Jesuits of brothers José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega, cradle of a Marian veneration born in Aparecida in 1717, Brazil is now home to the largest Marian church in the world — the second Catholic church after Saint Peter's in Rome —^[11]. The Aparecida Basilica welcomes, according to figures released by the national sanctuary itself, around 8 million pilgrims in ordinary years, more in years of great attendance, making it one of the busiest Marian sites on the planet, along with Guadalupe and Lourdes^[12].

However, it is also in Brazil that the Catholic decline is clearest: according to the national census (IBGE), the share of Catholics there fell from around 89% in 1980 to 64.6% in 2010, while evangelicals rose from 6.6% to 22.2% over the same period; according to the Pew survey conducted among adults in 2024, Catholics are now only 46% (compared to 61% in 2013-14) and Protestants 29% (compared to 26%)^[13][14]. The 2022 national census, whose religion section was published in June 2025, confirms the trend across the whole population: 56.7% Catholics and 26.9% evangelicals^[15]. The country continues to numerically dominate global Catholicity, but in a historically new way: no longer as a monofaith nation, but as an open religious marketplace.

A relative decline, but still a major weight

The following table gives the order of magnitude of the large Latin American Catholic communities based on data from the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae and Pew surveys:

At the regional level, the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2024 confirms the contrast: Africa rose from 281 to more than 288 million Catholics between 2023 and 2024, while the share of the American continent receded slightly, from 47.8% to 47.7% of the world total^[16]. The weight of the continent remains major, but the confessional erosion, until now discreet, has emerged as the great pastoral question of the beginning of the 21st century. It is precisely this concern which has structured all the general conferences of CELAM since Medellín, and which has guided the agenda of Pope Francis.

1492 — the Cross and the Sword

The history of the Church in Latin America begins with the first mass celebrated in the New World on January 6, 1494 at La Isabela (Hispaniola), during Christopher Columbus's second voyage^[17]. From this moment, the destiny of the faith is linked to that of the Spanish and Portuguese conquerors. The Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), sanctioned by Pope Alexander VI, shared the lands to be discovered between the two Iberian crowns, associating it with an obligation of evangelization^[18]. This double dimension – pastoral and political – will mark the Catholicism of the continent for five centuries.

The missionary method is organized according to the system of royal patronage (Patronato regio), by which the kings of Spain and Portugal present the bishops and finance the missions, in exchange for ecclesial submission to the crowns. Very quickly, the abuses of the encomiendas system — where Indians were handed over to settlers in exchange for a theoretical obligation to evangelize — caused a moral crisis whose consequences went to the heart of Catholic theology.

The cry of Antonio de Montesinos (December 21, 1511)

On the fourth Sunday of Advent 1511, in the small town of Santo Domingo (on the island of Hispaniola), a Spanish Dominican took the pulpit. Antonio de Montesinos came with a team of Dominican preachers led by Pedro de Córdoba, and they all decided, as a community, to publicly denounce the treatment of the Indians by their own compatriots. The sermon is short, but it makes conquest tremble.

“Tell me, by what right and with what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? By what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who lived peacefully and quietly on their lands, exterminating countless numbers of them by unheard-of deaths and massacres? (...) Are these people not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as yourselves?” — Antonio de Montesinos, Advent sermon, Santo Domingo, December 21, 1511, reported by Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, book III, ch. 4^[19]

This “Cry of Santo Domingo” is the first act of evangelical resistance to the colonial system. The news reached the court of Castile. King Ferdinand the Catholic, moved, summoned theologians and jurists; on December 27, 1512, the Laws of Burgos emerged, the first code for the treatment of Indians, which limited forced labor to nine months per year and imposed the obligation of catechesis^[20]. The system is not abolished, but the principle is established: Indians are men, sons of God, and the Church cannot accept that we treat them otherwise.

Bartolomé de Las Casas, defender of the Indians

In the audience at Montesinos' sermon is a young encomendero who himself owns Indians: Bartolomé de Las Casas (around 1484-1566). This sermon did not immediately convert him; several years would still be needed, but in 1514 Las Casas renounces his encomiendas, becomes a Dominican and devotes the rest of his life to the defense of the Amerindian peoples: incessant travels between the Indies and Spain, pleas at court, documented dossiers, resounding controversy in Valladolid in 1550-1551 facing the jurist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda on the question: are Indians men?^[21].

Las Casas achieves decisive success. On November 20, 1542, Emperor Charles V promulgated the Leyes Nuevas (New Laws) which prohibited Indian slavery and organized the progressive abolition of encomiendas^[22]. Ten years later, in his Very brief account of the destruction of the Indies (1552), Las Casas delivers to the world an indictment which will found, despite its polemical excesses, what historians call the "black legend" of the Spanish conquest - but above all what Christian conscience will call, four centuries later, the preferential option for the poor.

The Reductions of Paraguay and the Iberian missionary genius

Alongside the Dominicans, the Jesuits deployed in the 17th and 18th centuries the “miracle of the Reductions of Paraguay”: self-managed Indian villages, led by the Fathers of the Company, where the Guaranis lived apart from the encomenderos and according to a remarkably balanced Christian, economic and cultural organization. Until their expulsion in 1767-1768, the Reductions brought together up to 140,000 Indians in around thirty villages, and were hailed by Montesquieu and Voltaire as a form of “Christian civilization”^[23]. Founding saints like Roque González de Santa Cruz gave their lives there for the Gospel.

This great adventure does not erase the ambiguities of evangelization. But it shows that, from the 16th century, the Catholic Church in Latin America is not only the "chapel of conquest": it is also its critical conscience and its antidote.

The evangelization of the continent has never been done only through sermons and codes: it was done, in a unique way in the world, by the Virgin Mary. Three great Marian figures structure Latin American devotion and illustrate what theologians call “Marian inculturation”: Guadalupe in Mexico, Aparecida in Brazil, and a constellation of national patronesses.

Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531): the “Mestiza Virgin”

Barely ten years after the fall of the Aztec empire, while the evangelization of Mexico seemed to be stalling, the Virgin Mary appeared to a recently baptized Chichimec Indian, Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin. Between Saturday December 9 and Tuesday December 12, 1531, on the hill of Tepeyac - ancient place of worship of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin -, Mary presented herself to him in the Nahuatl language, in the guise of a young mixed-race woman, pregnant, dressed in the style of Indian nobles, and asked him to build a sanctuary for her. To authenticate the message to the bishop Juan de Zumárraga, she made Castile roses bloom on the arid hill in the middle of winter. When Juan Diego unfolds his mantle, tilma, in front of the bishop, the roses fall — and the image of the Virgin remains imprinted on the agave fabric.

“Am I not here, I who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and under my protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the folds of my cloak, in the hollow of my arms? ” — Words of the Virgin to Juan Diego, reported by the Nican Mopohua, Nahuatl story from the 16th century attributed to Antonio Valeriano^[24]

The effect is stunning. The 16th-century Franciscan chroniclers estimate at several million — the figure of nine million baptisms in a few years is often repeated in Catholic literature — the number of Indians who entered the Church in the following decade: historians see in it one of the largest collective conversion movements in the entire history of the Church. The Virgin spoke their language, took their face, and completed in a few years what sermons in Latin could not do in several decades. The tilma, preserved at the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico, is today the most visited Marian sanctuary in the world, with, according to figures put forward by the rectory, around 20 million visitors per year — including some 10 to 12 million for the feast of December 12 alone (record of 12.5 million in December 2022, according to the Mexico City government). She was recognized patroness of Mexico in 1737, patroness of Latin America by Saint Pius X in 1910, then Empress of the Americas by Pius XII on October 12, 1945; John Paul II invoked her as “Patroness of all America, Star of the first and the new evangelization” (Ecclesia in America, January 22, 1999) and extended her feast of December 12 to the whole continent. Juan Diego is the first Indian saint of America, canonized by John Paul II on July 31, 2002 in the Basilica of Guadalupe itself.

Our Lady of Aparecida (1717): the patroness of Brazil

200 years away and 9,000 km away, another Marian story founded Brazilian Catholicism. In October 1717, three fishermen — Domingos Garcia, Filipe Pedroso and João Alves — cast their nets into the Paraíba do Sul river to prepare a banquet in honor of the governor of Brazil. After hours without catching anything, they brought back in their nets the body of a small statue of the Virgin deprived of its head, then, with the next shot, the corresponding head. It is a statue of the Immaculate Conception in terracotta, 40 cm high, probably sculpted around 1600 by the monk Agostinho de Jesus^[25]. Immediately after this miraculous catch, the nets filled to overflowing.

The statue, nicknamed Nossa Senhora Aparecida (“Our Lady Appeared”), remained for fifteen years in the house of Filipe Pedroso, where they prayed. Graces multiplied. In 1745, a first chapel was built. In 1930, Pius XI officially proclaimed her patroness of Brazil and queen of the country^[26]. On July 4, 1980, John Paul II dedicated the new Basilica of Aparecida — the second largest Catholic church in the world after Saint Peter's in Rome — capable of accommodating 45,000 faithful. Today it receives, according to figures released by the sanctuary itself, around 8 million pilgrims in ordinary years, more in years of great attendance^[27]. It is in this sanctuary that the fifth general conference of the Latin American episcopate — that of Aparecida — will be held, in May 2007.

National patronesses: Luján, Coromoto, Copacabana

Beyond Guadalupe and Aparecida, almost every Latin American country has its own national Marian patroness. Our Lady of Luján has been patroness of Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay since the miracle of a statue that refused to move in 1630^[28]. Our Lady of Copacabana, sculpted in 1583 by the Indian Tito Yupanqui, is patroness of Bolivia^[29]. Our Lady of Coromoto, who appeared to a Cospes Indian on September 8, 1652, is patroness of Venezuela — a title proclaimed by the Venezuelan episcopate in 1942, confirmed by Pius XII on October 7, 1944 — and was canonically crowned on September 11, 1952^[30]. Our Lady of Mount Carmel is patroness of Chile and Peru; Our Lady of Caacupé is patroness of Paraguay. These great Marian figures function as political and cultural patrons as well as spiritual ones: armies placed themselves under their protection, roads were inaugurated in their honor, and they were crowned during independence commemorations.

Latin America did not only receive the faith: very early on, it gave saints. And some of these saints have become universal figures of Christian holiness, spanning a continent.

Saint Rose of Lima (1586-1617), first saint of the New World

Isabel Flores de Oliva, in religion Rose of Saint Mary (in Spanish Rosa de Santa María), born in Lima in 1586 in a modest family in the viceroyalty of Peru, entered the Dominicans of the Third Order, refused marriage all her life, led a life of prayer, penance and service to the poor, and died at 31 years old on August 24 1617. Beatified by Clement IX in 1668, she was canonized on April 12, 1671 by Clement X: she is the first saint of the New World^[31]. Today she is patron of the Americas, the Philippines, Peru, Lima and the Catholic University of Peru.

The first American saints: Toribio, Martin, Pierre Claver

Before the end of the 17th century, the New World had already produced a first harvest of saints. Saint Toribio de Mogrovejo (1538-1606), archbishop of Lima, was the great organizer of the Peruvian Church in the 16th century: he evangelized the Andean peoples up to the heights of the Andes, confirmed Saint Rose of Lima and Saint Martin de Porres, and held around ten diocesan synods. Saint Martin de Porres (1579-1639), mulatto from Lima, lay Dominican then lay brother, became the great saint of the poor, the sick and the slaves of the city; he is the first black saint of the New World, canonized by John XXIII in 1962. Saint Peter Claver (1580-1654), Catalan Jesuit installed in Cartagena de Indias (present-day Colombia), was baptized under the title "slave of black slaves" and spent forty years evangelizing and caring for African slaves disembarked at the port - he was canonized by Leo XIII in 1888.

Saint Juan Diego (c. 1474-1548)

The Chichimec Indian to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared remained a figure of popular devotion for a long time, without an official canonical process. It was John Paul II who opened his cause in the 20th century. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was beatified in Mexico on May 6, 1990 by John Paul II, then canonized on July 31, 2002 in the Basilica of Guadalupe, in front of millions of faithful^[32]. He is the first indigenous saint of America, and the canonization underlined that through him, an entire people “crushed” by the conquest was elevated to sainthood.

Saint Oscar Romero (1917-1980), martyr of the altar

Closer to us, on March 24, 1980, Mgr Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, fell murdered by a bullet to the heart, at the altar, while raising the chalice of consecration, in the chapel of the hospital of Divine Providence^[33]. He was sixty-two years old. The day before, in his radio homily, he had launched an unprecedented cry to the Salvadoran soldiers engaged in the civil war.

“I would like to appeal in a special way to the men of the army. Brothers, you are of the same people. You are killing your own peasant brothers. (...) In the name of God, and in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more tumultuously every day, I beg you, I pray you, I order you in the name of God: put an end to the repression! ” — Mgr Oscar Romero, homily broadcast in San Salvador, March 23, 1980 (the day before his assassination)^[34]

The assassination was ordered by the Salvadoran extreme right, in particular the former officer Roberto D'Aubuisson, founder of the ARENA party, as the United Nations Truth Commission (1993)^[35] later established. Romero, long regarded in Rome with suspicion as a bishop close to liberation theology, was finally beatified as a martyr of the faith (in odium fidei) by Pope Francis in San Salvador on May 23, 2015, then canonized in Saint Peter's Square on October 14, 2018^[36]. Alongside him, that day, Paul VI was also canonized. Romero thus became the first canonized Latin American martyr bishop of the contemporary era - an eminent figure of this Church called by Vatican II to place itself on the side of the poor.

If the Church of Africa has its SECAM, founded in 1969, it is on the model of an older structure created in Latin America: the CELAM. This Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano (Latin American Episcopal Council), established in Rio de Janeiro in 1955, was the first continental episcopal conference in the world, and remains one of the most active.

Rio 1955: birth of CELAM under Pius XII

The creation of CELAM is part of the great dynamic of Pius XII to structure the Church beyond Europe. At the invitation of Pius XII and under the presidency of the Italian cardinal Adeodato Giovanni Piazza, nearly a hundred bishops from all Latin American countries met in Rio de Janeiro from July 25 to August 4, 1955, immediately following the 36th International Eucharistic Congress^[37]. They resolved to create a permanent structure capable of coordinating the pastoral care of the continent, and Pius XII officially approved it by apostolic letter of November 2, 1955. CELAM is thus the first continental episcopal body in the history of the Church — it prefigures the subsequent African, Asian and European continental conferences.

Medellín 1968: Vatican II in Latin America

The second general conference, in Medellín (Colombia) from August 24 to September 6, 1968, is the founding event of the modern Latin American Church. Opened by Paul VI in person — the first trip by a pope to Latin America — its mission is to translate the Second Vatican Council into the language and emergencies of the continent^[38]. The final document is dramatic: the Church takes note of a situation of “institutionalized violence” on the continent and calls for a profound change in structures.

The “Peace” document notes that large populations of the continent live in a situation of injustice which it calls “institutionalized violence” and calls for profound transformations of structures (No. 16)^[39].

It is in Medellín that appears, in still cautious formulations, what will become the “preferential option for the poor”. The Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, young peritus of the conference, uses for the first time publicly the expression "liberation theology"^[40][41]. The enthusiasm is immense; ambiguities too.

Puebla 1979: John Paul II and the turning point in discernment

Eleven years later, the third general conference was held in Puebla (Mexico) from January 27 to February 13, 1979. It is opened personally by John Paul II, who goes for his first trip outside Europe to the sanctuary of Guadalupe then to the major seminary of Puebla^[42]. The pope comes to strengthen a Church marked by the doctrinal and political excesses of part of liberation theology. His inaugural speech of January 28, 1979 is unusually firm.

• “This conception of Christ as politician, revolutionary, the bringer of subversion of Nazareth, is not in agreement with the catechesis of the Church. ”* — John Paul II, Opening speech of the IIIrd General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate, Puebla, January 28, 1979, I, 4^[43]

But John Paul II does not disavow Medellín: he confirms the option for the poor and gives it its classic formulation. The final Puebla document uses for the first time the expression “preferential option for the poor” as the guiding principle of continental pastoral care, rooting it in Christology and not in Marxist analysis^[44].

Santo Domingo 1992: the new evangelization

On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the evangelization of the continent (1492-1992), the fourth general conference was held in Santo Domingo from October 12 to 28, 1992, where Antonio de Montesinos had shouted his prophetic sermon. John Paul II opens it a second time and proposes as the central axis the “new evangelization”: a new missionary announcement in its fervor, its methods and its expression, but identical in its content^[45]. The conference deals with human promotion and Christian culture and insists, in an era marked by the fall of communism and globalization, on the need for a respectful inculturation of indigenous and African-American cultures.

Aparecida 2007: Bergoglio and the “missionary disciples”

The fifth general conference is being held in Aparecida (Brazil) from May 13 to 31, 2007, in the Brazilian national sanctuary. Benedict XVI opens it personally, in the basilica of Aparecida, and entrusts the work to 162 representatives from 22 episcopal conferences of the continent, or 266 participants^[46]. The theme of the conference is “Disciples and missionaries of Jesus Christ, so that our people may have life in him” — reference to John 14, 6.

Above all, it elected to coordinate the drafting of the final document a previously discreet cardinal: the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The latter directs the Editorial Commission with a method that will remain famous: patient work “from the bottom up”, listening to each bishop, to achieve not a compromise but a “harmony”^[47]. The Document of Aparecida, approved by the Holy See on July 11, 2007, will remain as the programmatic roadmap for the pontificate of Francis (2013-2025)^[48]. All its themes are already there: missionary discipleship, Church going out, option for the poor, defense of creation, primacy of the people of God.

• “The pastoral conversion of our communities requires moving from a pastoral of simple conservation to a decidedly missionary pastoral. ”* — CELAM, Aparecida final document, May 31, 2007, n° 370^[49]

The document assigns to this conversion a goal: that the joy of having found Christ reach all, and that the peoples of the continent have life in him — this is the very theme of the conference (cf. preamble)^[50].

The following table summarizes the five general conferences and their own spiritual axis.

No other regional Church has produced, in the 20th century, a theological movement as original – and as controversial – as liberation theology. A specifically Latin American phenomenon, born from the clash between Vatican II, Medellín and the massive poverty of the continent, this current has marked the universal Church and provoked two successive doctrinal instructions from the Holy See.

Gustavo Gutiérrez and the birth of a current (1968-1971)

It’s in Peru that it all begins. The Dominican theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino (1928-2024), priest of the diocese of Lima, published in July 1971 in Lima a book of approximately 400 pages entitled Teología de la liberación: perspectivas: this will be the founding manifesto of the movement^[51]. Gutiérrez had already used the expression "liberation theology" in Medellín in 1968. His book, translated into fifteen languages, offers a rereading of the Church's mission starting from the poor, drawing inspiration both from the social doctrine of the Church, from Latin American social sciences (analysis of structures of dependence), and from the exodic paradigm of biblical liberation.

The central intuition is strong and remains theologically valid: Christ is poor and in solidarity with the poor, therefore the Church must be too. But the trend will diversify quickly, and certain versions will seriously go wrong.

The strong versions: Boff, Sobrino, and the Marxist drift

With Leonardo Boff (Brazil), Jon Sobrino (El Salvador), Juan Luis Segundo (Uruguay) and several others, some variants integrate a Marxist analysis as an interpretive tool of history and rewrite Christology, ecclesiology and even the sacraments from a materialist and revolutionary framework. Boff published Church, charisma and power in 1981: he denounced the Church-institution as a structure of domination, proposed a “popular Church” distinct from the hierarchy, and conceived the Gospel as a socio-political project^[52]. Sobrino, in Cristología desde América Latina (1976), presents a Jesus essentially engaged in political struggle, at the risk of weakening his divinity and his salvific universality.

It is this doctrinal slippage — not the option for the poor in itself — that worries Rome.

Libertatis Nuntius (1984): Roman criticism

On August 6, 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (future Benedict XVI), published the Instruction Libertatis Nuntius — on some aspects of “liberation theology”^[53]. The text clearly distinguishes two levels. On the one hand, the liberating aspiration of liberation theology is legitimate and Christian; on the other, some of its versions are unacceptable because they replace the mystery of salvation with a reductive Marxist analysis, transform faith into revolutionary ideology, and degrade Christology and ecclesiology.

• “The Instruction has the precise aim of drawing the attention of pastors, theologians and all the faithful to the deviations and risks of deviation, damaging to the faith and Christian life, which result from certain forms of liberation theology which resort, in an insufficiently critical manner, to concepts borrowed from various currents of Marxist thought. ”* — Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Libertatis Nuntius, CDF, August 6, 1984, Introduction^[54]

Following this Instruction, Leonardo Boff was summoned to Rome by the CDF and subjected to a year of obedient silence (1985); he would later leave the clerical state. Several other theologians were called to order in the 1980s and 1990s.

Libertatis Conscientia (1986): authentic Christian liberation

Many have retained only the Instruction of 1984; but Rome insisted on immediately completing its word. On March 22, 1986, the same CDF published a second Instruction, Libertatis Conscientia — on Christian freedom and liberation^[55]. The text proposes a positive Christian theology of liberation, based on Scripture, the social doctrine of the Church and the dignity of the person. He affirms that the integral liberation, of which the Gospel is the bearer, goes beyond the strictly socio-political horizon without denying it: it frees from death, from sin, and directs towards eternal life, while requiring the integral promotion of people and societies.

This double Instruction (1984 + 1986) marked a lasting balance: no to Marxist and revolutionary mixtures of faith, yes to the preferential option for the poor as a permanent requirement of the Gospel. This balance has become common heritage of the entire contemporary magisterium — it will be taken up by John Paul II (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 1987), Benedict XVI, and very particularly by Francis.

A peaceful reception under Francis

On September 12, 2013, six months after his election, Pope Francis received Gustavo Gutiérrez in Rome and addressed him a public sign of friendship and theological respect^[56]. In 2014, on the occasion of a Roman conference on Gutiérrez, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, then prefect of the CDF, co-published a book of interviews favorable to the Christian dimension of liberation theology. Gustavo Gutiérrez died in Lima on October 22, 2024 at the age of 96; in his video message for the funeral, on October 24, 2024, Pope Francis hailed him as "a great man, a man of the Church"^[57]. The option for the poor has become, under Francis, one of the most frequently recalled principles of the pontifical magisterium — proof that an essential part of Latin American intuition has been received by the entire universal Church.

The 20th century made Latin America a land of martyrs, fallen under the bullets of right-wing dictatorships, Marxist guerrillas, death squads, drug traffickers. The emblematic figures are numerous; the official lists published by national episcopal conferences exceed several hundred names.

Mgr Oscar Romero, voice of the voiceless

The most universal figure remains that of Saint Oscar Romero (see above), but it is inseparable from a larger drama. Salvador of the 1970s-1980s saw a bloody civil war between a brutal state army and Marxist guerrillas; in the middle, the Church finds itself caught in a vice. Romero chooses the voice of poor peasants, denounces the death squads, refuses to bless military power - and is murdered at the altar.

The Jesuits of the UCA (November 16, 1989)

Nearly ten years after Romero, on November 16, 1989, around 1 a.m., an elite unit of the Salvadoran army — the Atlacatl battalion — broke into the Jesuit residence of the University of Central America (UCA) in San Salvador. The soldiers shot six Jesuit priests, as well as the cook and her 16-year-old daughter, at point-blank range: a veritable massacre, ordered from the top of the military hierarchy.

The six Jesuit priests martyrs are:

• Father Ignacio Ellacuría SJ (1930-1989), rector of the UCA, philosopher and theologian of Basque origin;
• Father Ignacio Martín-Baró SJ (1942-1989), psychologist, academic vice-rector;
• P. Segundo Montes SJ (1933-1989), sociologist, director of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos;
• Father Amando López SJ (1936-1989), theologian;
• Father Joaquín López y López SJ (1918-1989), founder of Fe y Alegría;
• Father Juan Ramón Moreno SJ (1933-1989), librarian and trainer.

With them are killed Elba Ramos, the cook, and her daughter Celina Mariceth Ramos, aged 16, whom the Jesuits had taken in for the night, thinking to protect them. The planning of the massacre included the explicit order to "kill Ellacuría and leave no witnesses"**^[58]. The crime, long covered up in El Salvador, was finally recognized: in September 2020, former colonel Inocente Orlando Montano was sentenced to 133 years in prison by the Spanish Audiencia Nacional^[59]. Several of the six Jesuits were recognized theologians of Christian liberation theology; all, through their patient work for peace, had become targets.

Catechists, nuns and laity of dictatorships

Alongside these known figures, the national martyrological lists — Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Mexico — include hundreds of bishops, priests, nuns and lay people murdered since 1970. In Guatemala, Mgr Juan José Gerardi was assassinated at his home on April 26, 1998, two days after presenting the report Guatemala: Nunca Más on the crimes of the civil war. In Argentina, under the military dictatorship (1976-1983), bishops Enrique Angelelli († 1976) and Carlos Horacio Ponce de León († 1977) were killed in faked road “accidents”. In Brazil, under the dictatorship, the Dominican brother Tito de Alencar († 1974) succumbed to the after-effects of torture. More recently, in Mexico, at least ten priests were murdered between 2018 and 2024 in a climate of endemic narco-criminal violence — one of the most deadly for Catholic clergy in the world^[60].

The history of the Latin American Church reached a symbolic summit on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, at 7:06 p.m. (Rome time), when, from the central balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran pronounced the "Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum": the new pope is Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who takes the name of Francis^[61].

From the son of Italian emigrants to the archbishop of Buenos Aires

Born in Buenos Aires on December 17, 1936 to an Italian railway accountant father who emigrated from Piedmont and an Argentine mother of Italian origin, Bergoglio entered the Jesuits on March 11, 1958 after serious pneumonia leading to the removal of a lung^[62]. He was ordained a priest on December 13, 1969, took his solemn vows in 1973 and became provincial of the Argentine Jesuits between 1973 and 1979, in the midst of a military dictatorship. Auxiliary of Buenos Aires in 1992, he became archbishop on February 28, 1998 and was created cardinal by John Paul II on February 21, 2001. He is known for his austere lifestyle (public transport, meals with the poor in villas miseria, refusal of the episcopal archbishopric), his clear option for the poor and his doctrinal fidelity. In 2007, he headed the Aparecida Editorial Commission.

March 13, 2013: “almost at the end of the world”

At the conclave following the renunciation of Benedict XVI (February 28, 2013), Bergoglio was elected in the fifth round of voting. He chose the name Francis in memory of Saint Francis of Assisi, inspired by the words of Brazilian Cardinal Cláudio Hummes: “Do not forget the poor”^[63]. To the faithful gathered in Saint Peter's Square, he declared:

• “You know that the duty of the conclave was to give Rome a bishop. It seems that my brother cardinals went to look for him almost at the end of the world. But here we are. ”* — Pope Francis, first greeting to the Roman people, balcony of Saint Peter's Basilica, March 13, 2013^[64]

He was then the first Jesuit pope, the first Latin American pope, and the first non-European pope since the Syrian Gregory III (731-741). For Latin America, the moment is historic: the continent which received the faith from Europe in the 16th century now gives a pope to the universal Church.

The legacy of Aparecida in the pontificate of Francis

The originality of Francis' pontificate is largely due to the fact that he implemented, on a universal scale, the Aparecida document of which he was the main drafter. Three axes of Aparecida are found in all the major pontifical texts:

• An “outgoing”, missionary Church — Evangelii Gaudium, November 24, 2013, programmatic exhortation^[65].
• The option for the poor and the exclusion of the “voiceless” — from chapter IV of Evangelii Gaudium to the social encyclical Fratelli tutti, October 3, 2020.
• Care of the “common home” and respect for indigenous peoples — Laudato Si', May 24, 2015, encyclical on the safeguarding of creation^[66].

Added to these axes is the explicit reception of the Amazon question: Francis convenes the Synod for the Amazon in Rome from October 6 to 27, 2019, then publishes the exhortation Querida Amazonia on February 2, 2020, where he places inculturation, the defense of indigenous peoples and integral ecology at the center. Pope Francis died on April 21, 2025 in Rome, Easter Monday, after twelve years of pontificate — leaving the universal Church with a largely Latin American footprint^[67]. On May 8, 2025, the conclave gathered after his funeral elected his successor: the Augustinian cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, born in Chicago (United States) in 1955 and long a missionary then bishop in Peru, who took the name of Leo XIV — the second non-European pope of the contemporary era after Francis^[68].

Despite this historical and symbolic weight, at the beginning of the 21st century the Latin American Church is going through the most serious confessional crisis in its history: a continuous Catholic erosion, an explosion of Pentecostal Churches, a meteoric rise of those without religion, and new pastoral fronts (secularization, narco-violence, secularization of elites, sexuality, defense of life).

Catholic decline measured by Pew (2014 and 2026)

Two successive surveys from the Pew Research Center, in 2014 and 2026, measured this change with unprecedented precision^[69][70]. In 2014, the survey carried out among 30,000 people in 19 Latin American countries revealed a key threshold: 69% of Catholic adults across the continent, compared to 84% who had been raised Catholic — or 15 points lost in a generation by a simple change of affiliation^[71]. Ten years later, in January 2026, Pew publishes a new survey conducted in 2024: in the six major countries surveyed, the share of Catholics has further fallen by at least 9 points^[72].

The table below summarizes the most notable results:

In four out of six countries (Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico), those “without religion” are now more numerous than Protestants^[73]. This is a historic shift.

The explosion of Pentecostal Churches and the “Prosperity Gospel”

The big winner in the Latin American "religious market" is not historic Protestantism, but Pentecostalism in all its forms - Assemblies of God, Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (IURD), Church of the Christian Congregation. These churches promise a highly emotional experience of the Holy Spirit, miraculous healings, and often a “prosperity theology” that presents wealth as a sign of divine blessing. Brazil, the main focus of the phenomenon, went from 6.6% evangelicals in the 1980 census to 29% Protestants in the 2024 Pew survey^[74][75]. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro relied on this evangelical electorate for his election in 2018; Latin American politics can no longer be understood without this new religious factor.

No religion, secularization and narco-violence

The second front is the rapid secularization of urban elites. Capitals such as Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Santiago, Lima and Mexico City see the share of their inhabitants declaring “no religion” sometimes exceeding 30%. Recent legislation on abortion (Argentina 2020, Colombia 2022, Mexico 2023), same-sex marriage (Mexico 2010, Argentina 2010, Brazil 2013) or euthanasia (Colombia 1997) mark a growing divorce between Catholic doctrine and the public culture of several major nations.

The third challenge is narco-criminal violence, which is destroying entire societies in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and the northern triangle of Central America. This violence kills, as we have seen, priests like other citizens, and weakens parish pastoral care and Catholic education. In Mexico, the Sembradores de Paz network mobilizes Jesuits to support targeted communities.

The following table summarizes the strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary Latin American Church:

Five centuries after Montesinos' sermon, the Latin American Church is no longer a "mission Church" of Europe: it has been, for a long time now, one of the three or four great continental Churches in the world, and probably still - for a time - the most numerous. She presents herself today to the universal Church with a face of her own, made up of spiritual patterns and historical scars.

What the continent brings to the universal Church

Latin America first offers an incarnate and popular Marian devotion, which has been able to reach people in their language, their skin and their symbols. It offers a decided commitment to the poor, which has become, after discernment, one of the central markers of the contemporary magisterium - Evangelii Gaudium, Laudato Si', Fratelli tutti are its fruits. It offers the missionary category of “Church going out”, already at the heart of the Aparecida document. Finally, she offers a living martyrdom who reminds us that Christian holiness is limited neither to the cloister nor to personal austerity: it can be embodied in the defense of human dignity at the price of blood shed at the altar.

An uncertain but open future

There remains the future. Catholic erosion measured by Pew is not destiny; it is a pastoral challenge. If a part of the faithful moves away, many others remain: tens of millions of Latin Americans continue to fill the sanctuaries, to found Catholic families, to catechize, to evangelize. The decisive question of the 21st century, for this Church, is that of the missionary conversion already traced by Aparecida - not to preserve, but to leave; not to administer, but to evangelize; not to dominate a culture, but to announce good news, as a young mixed-race Virgin had once done on the hill of Tepeyac.

No. 8 notes, among the values that inspire the peoples of the continent — human dignity, sense of celebration, friendship, solidarity with the poor —, a soil where “missionary disciples of Jesus Christ” can still take root^[76].

• Catholic missions in America — detailed history of the evangelization of the New World, from Christopher Columbus to the Reductions of Paraguay.
• Pape Francis (1936-2025) — biography of the first Latin American pope and his pontificate (2013-2025).
• Our Lady of Aparecida (1717) — the patroness of Brazil and the first Marian sanctuary in the world.
• Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531) — the mixed-race Virgin, patroness of Latin America.
• The Church in Africa today — another continental face of global Catholicism.
• The Church in contemporary China — another Church undergoing great change, in a completely different context.