Latin Americans are moving away from Catholicism, the region’s dominant religion

Across Latin America, fewer people are calling themselves Catholic, in a quiet demographic shift that is reshaping the region’s religious landscape — and one that neither the election of an Argentine pope in 2013 nor, more recently, of an American pontiff who also holds Peruvian citizenship has managed to reverse.

The findings come from a public opinion survey recently published by the Pew Research Center. Based on interviews with 6,200 adults conducted in 2024 across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, the study found that the share of adults identifying as Catholic has fallen by at least 9 percentage points over the past decade in every country surveyed.