The Decline of Trust in the Catholic Church in Latin America: Insights from an Opinion Study by Latinobarómetro

Trust in the Church in Latin America has fallen in the last 25 years, for example, “in 1996 it was difficult to meet a person on the street who said they were not Catholic, while today we are not the majority: professing Catholics have dropped from 80% to 56% since then”. This is how he explains it Marta Lagos, director of Latinobarómetroa firm that is in charge of carrying out opinion studies of all kinds throughout Latin America, founded in 1995 and that each year applies around 20,000 interviews in 18 countries, representing more than 600 million inhabitants.

This laywoman of Chilean origin points out that this decline “symbolizes a strong secularization process. Latin America has grown, people have had access to material goods, a process of strong materialism takes place and that alienates people from religion and empowers them, and people feel tremendously included in society through trade.” To this decrease, he adds the rise of agnosticism, having greater preponderance in countries like Uruguay, Argentina and Chile.

The truth is that “more than half of the population of Latin America continues to be Catholic” and in about 10 countries it continues to be the dominant one, but “It is no longer the Latin America of the 90s: it ceased to be that unanimously Catholic region.” In another 25 years this figure could double, threatening the existence of Catholicism in the “continent of hope” at a rate of 1% fewer believers per year.

QUESTION.- How do you explain this phenomenon of decrease?

ANSWER.- Today the nations in Latin America are going through very difficult times, because communication between people and institutions has deteriorated to a critical point. And it seems to me that in that sense, the Church is trying to repair that deficiency, At least in your field.

goodbye to the myths

Q.- Pope Francis, reading the signs of the times, does not encourage you to live synodality, what is your opinion of this?

R.- Listening to Francisco has broken many myths of what the Church’s trajectory was. The Pope has gone out, leaving a bit of the pomp of the Vatican that was moving away. Notice, as simple as when the Church decided to turn the altar and look at the people, this is also an exercise of that nature, going out to meet people.

It seems to me that in this sense the Pope has taken very important steps. Now, this is a cultural issue, it is not enough for the Pontiff to give the order and say what he wants to happen. Here is an issue both within the Church and within societies, which are difficult to change and take a long time. It seems to me that this synodality is precisely penetrating as much as possible in the communitieslisten to people to try to start this path of culture change.

Q.- What other aspects do you consider affect this crisis of Catholicism?

R.- Along with secularization, it must be said that in this process of degradation of institutions (democracy, parliament, political parties, the judicial system, the government), the Catholic Church has also fallen into this crisis of credibility. Not as much as the politicians, however, that is not a consolation. But to put the dimension, and although it is not only a problem of the Church, without a doubt, the scandals of the Church contributed enormously to the decline.

The question one asks is how the decline of the Church would have gone without the scandals. It is a hypothetical question that has no answer, but the resilience of Catholicism in Latin America is tremendously strong. Any other institution that makes the mistakes that the Church has made would have ceased to exist.