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Latin American

III. The prospect for the Church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Illtud Evans O.P.
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Latin America accounts for more than a third of the world’s Catholic population but for less than nine per cent of the world’s priests. The disproportion between these figures is the cardinal factor in the religious situation of a vast area almost wholly Catholic in nominal allegiance but which today presents one of the most urgent of the Church’s missionary problems.

The evidence of statistics is never the whole of any story, but the facts are so grave and their significance so little appreciated that this weakening of the Church’s essential function in South America must be further illustrated. It is usually assumed that a proportion of one priest to a thousand faithful is the barest minimum for assuring the Church’s basic ministrations. (In countries predominantly Protestant the ratio is much higher. Thus England and Wales have a proportion of one priest to about 450, the United States one to 622.) For the whole of Latin America the proportion is one to 7,000, with considerable variations in the different republics. (In Chile it is one to 3,000; in Argentina one to 4,750; in Brazil one to 8,000; in Honduras one to 10,350; in Guatemala one to 28,000.) The effective ministry of the priests there are (and in most countries many are in any case old) is hindered above all by the brute facts of geography. Thus in Venezuela a population of 4,500,000 is served by 800 priests, of whom 160 are at work in the diocese of Caracas alone. The remaining 640 are dispersed through a territory six times the size of France.

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 35 , Issue 407 , February 1954 , pp. 68 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 These statistics are quoted from a survey prepared by the Centre d'Information Catholique, 163 Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris 17. Additional figures have been obtained from various ecclesiastical sources and from private information. L'Actualité (January 1,1954) contains a survey of the Church in Argentina, but this has appeared too late for use to made of its valuable information.

2 These figures of course need further analysis for a true picture to appear. Thus in Brazil there were in 1946 altogether 6,383 priests, of whom 3,419 were regular clergy not necessarily engaged in pastoral work, and two‐thirds of these were foreigners.

3 An important article by Father Eugenio Pellegrino, S.J., which appeared in the Osservatore Romano, March 13, 1952, gives many details of Protestant activity in Latin America.

4 An article by Thales de Azevedo, professor of Anthropology in the University of Bahia, which appeared last year in the American Jesuit review Thought, is an authoritative survey of these problems in Brazilian Catholic life.

5 Cardinal Guevara, Archbishop of Lima, in a message at the conclusion of the Congress, lamented ‘the alarming proportion of those who call themselves Catholics in South America but who do not live in accordance with the teaching of Christ’. He went on to draw a contrast between the present vigour of the Church in the United States and its weakened status in South America.