John Allen has conclusions:

After recent travels in Africa and Central America, I’ve come to two conclusions about Catholicism in the global south as opposed to the north.

First, low Mass attendance rates in the north are generally an index of secularism. That is, they indicate Catholic populations for whom religious practice is not a terribly high priority. In the south, on the other hand, they’re usually a measure of the priest shortage. They point to populations that don’t have regular access to a priest, or who never became accustomed to Mass attendance because there was no priest in the area where they lived. For such groups, Catholicism has traditionally been a matter of baptisms, weddings and funerals, along with private devotions and family customs.

Secularization, at least in the northern sense, is basically non-existent across most of the global south. International values surveys regularly indicate that more than 90 percent of the population in the south regards religion as an important force in their lives. Belief in God, in the afterlife, in spirits and demons, in miracles and the power of prayer, is near-universal. Hence when Catholics don’t go to Mass, it’s not because they don’t believe.

That brings us to my second conclusion. In the north, when Catholics become frustrated with the church, they usually just drop out, drifting into non-practice. In the south, when Catholics become frustrated, they often become Pentecostals.

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These two realities help set the scene for the upcoming fifth General Conference of the Bishops of Latin American and the Caribbean (CELAM) in Aparecida, Brazil, in early May. Despite an uptick in vocations to the priesthood in some parts of Latin America (Honduras, for example, currently has 170 seminarians, an all-time high), realistically the numbers of new priests will not be adequate to deliver intensely personal pastoral care to almost 500 million Catholics. Hence the bishops will face pressure to embrace a new model, one which sees laity as the primary agents of many kinds of pastoral care – visits to the sick, youth ministry, leaders of faith formation programs and catechesis, and even as administrators of church institutions at parish, diocesan, national and international levels.