We’ve heard much about the Latino influence on the American Catholic Church — and how the tide of immigrants is replenishing the faith. But not all of those who come to this country Catholic remain in the Church. And the New York Times is taking a long and interesting look at this phenomenon — and why so many leave:

To say she was a practicing Catholic would be an understatement. For years, Maria Aparecida Calazans was a mainstay at her Long Island church, joining dozens of fellow Brazilian immigrants for the Portuguese language Mass on Sunday mornings. She and her husband, Ramon, were married at the church. Their two daughters were baptized there, and every Friday she attended a prayer meeting that she had helped organize.

But six years ago, her husband went to a relative’s baptism at a Pentecostal church in a warehouse in Astoria, Queens, and came home smitten.

The couple made a deal. “We would go to the Pentecostal service on Thursdays and to Mass on Sundays, and then we would decide which one we felt most comfortable with,” Mrs. Calazans said.

Within 40 days, they had given up Roman Catholicism and embraced Pentecostalism, following the path of the estimated 1.3 million Latino Catholics who have joined Pentecostal congregations since immigrating to the United States, according to a survey released in February by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

“I feel whole here,” Mrs. Calazans, 42, said one recent Sunday in the Astoria sanctuary, the Portuguese Language Pentecostal Missionary Church, as she swayed to the pop-rock beat of a live gospel band. “This church is not a place we visit once a week. This church is where we hang around and we share our problems and we celebrate our successes, like we were family.”

As Pope Benedict XVI completes his visit to the United States on Sunday with a Mass at Yankee Stadium, in a borough that has been home to generations of Latinos, he does so facing something of a growing challenge to the church’s immigrant ranks.

For if Latinos are feeding the population of the church, many have also turned to Pentecostalism, a form of evangelical Christianity that stresses a personal, even visceral, connection with God.

Today, it has more Latino followers in the United States than any other denomination except Catholicism; they are drawn, they say, by the faith’s joyous worship, its use of Latino culture and the enveloping sense of community it offers to newcomers. As the Pew survey revealed, half of all Latinos who have joined Pentecostal denominations were raised as Catholics.

They are part of a global shift. Pentecostalism, the world’s fastest-growing branch of Christianity, has made such sharp inroads in Latin America, particularly in Brazil, that in an address to bishops there last year, Pope Benedict listed its ardent proselytizing as one of the major forces the Catholic Church must contend with in the region.

Catholic leaders and experts on the church in the United States say that the impact of Pentecostalism has been less dramatic here. Still, the pope has urged the nation’s bishops to make every effort to welcome immigrants — “to share their joys and hopes, to support them in their sorrows and trials, and to help them flourish in their new home.” And any number of Catholic clergy and laypeople have conceded that the church needs to work harder at reaching, and keeping, its Latino flock.

“That some of the newly arrived Latinos are drawn to Pentecostalism is certainly reason for concern,” said the Rev. Allan Figueroa Deck, the executive director of the Office for Cultural Diversity, which was created last June by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to help the church adjust to its changing ethnic makeup.

“But we can counter that with the kind of music we use, with the sense of celebration that we bring to our worship, the spontaneity and some of the popular customs that are not part of the official liturgy of the church. We’re doing some of that, but we could do better.”

The Pentecostal church in Astoria vividly shows what Catholicism is up against. It offers enough activities to fill a family’s calendar: services on Sunday and Thursday, youth group meetings on Friday, a Bible study group on Wednesday and all-night prayer vigils throughout the year. Then there are the birthday and engagement parties, to which every congregant is invited.

The church, on the second floor of a stucco building opposite a nightclub and three blocks from the subway, is half house of worship and half community center. It ministers primarily to a single immigrant group, Brazilians, in the group’s language, Portuguese — much as the ethnic urban parishes founded by European Catholics did more than a century ago.

The Sunday service starts at 4 p.m., but the front door opens at least two hours earlier, and families trickle in. One recent Sunday, children giggled and ran around while mothers greeted one another with a kiss on each cheek, as is the custom in Brazil.

The pastor, Zeny Tinouco, himself a former Catholic, preached to about 100 people from a pulpit framed by American and Brazilian flags. Arms rose into the air and hands were turned to the ceiling as a guitar-and-drums band tore through pop-inflected hymns. Over and over in his sermon, the pastor exclaimed, “Alleluia!” and the congregants fervently responded, “Glória a Deus!” (“Praise the Lord!”).

“The first thing I tell the newcomers is that there are no lambs without a shepherd in our church; no one is a stranger,” said Pastor Tinouco, 62, who has a high school education and 11 churches — three each in New York City, Portugal and his native Brazil; one in Switzerland; and one in Newark.

“Our mission is to welcome the immigrant and be his guide and his support,” he said. “If they need money to pay the rent, we’ll raise the money for them. If they need work, we’ll find them work. If they need someone to talk to, they can come to me.”

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Photo: by Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times