A Nod and a Shrug

”Something happened over the past decade and, yes, it worries us,” says Bishop Odilo Scherer, secretary general of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops Conference.

What happened, according to the Brazilian Census Bureau, was a major decline in the percentage of Catholics in Brazil’s population — which fell from 84 percent in 1991 to 74 percent in 2000.

While Brazil, with 178 million inhabitants, is nominally the world’s largest Catholic country, its fervor can be less than overwhelming. In 2001, a survey by The Religious and Social Studies Center, a Rio de Janeiro academic group, found that only a third of declared Catholics in Brazilian cities practiced their religion.