A sharp drop in the number of baptisms—along with a similar drop in marriages—points to an overall decline in the faith, warns a report from the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM).
The report shows that between 2000 and 2020, the number of annual baptisms plunged by more than one-third: from 8.2 million to 5.1 million. The CELAM report concluded: “It is possible to conjecture that the number of Catholics in the region…will fall in the near future.”
The report also took note of a decline in loyalty to the Church, which seemed “to indicate a loss of weight of the Catholic Church in the Latin American population, a distancing from the institution.”