Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez Lunes, 29 de Septiembre del 2025
In a new poll, only 35 percent of Poles trust the Catholic Church “strongly” or “rather strongly”, a 22 percent loss from 2016.
In Latin America, available data from the Latinobarómetro series shows a devastating loss of trust in the Catholic Church over three decades.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Michael Phạm Minh Cường, the recently appointed bishop of San Diego, California, in an interview with PBS Newshour, stated, once again, how important is for his Church to keep the trust of their faithful.
Monsignor Phạm is one of the few members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops willing to help migrants facing the new harsh realities of Donald Trump’s migration policy.
Most of the interview dealt with his efforts on that field, but at some point Amna Nawaz, asked him about the ongoing clergy sexual abuse crisis in his diocese, already in bankruptcy to settle the many cases affecting it as other dioceses all over the world. Pham offered some details of what his former superior, the current archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert McElroy did on the matter.
Asked by Nawaz about the ability of his diocese to be accountable on the issue, Pham answered: “We want to make sure that people trust us and believe in us.” The full transcript of the interview is available here.
Last year, Los Ángeles Press went over the crisis in San Diego and California at large as part of a comparison of how the Catholic Church deals with sexual abuse in the California, United States, and on the other side of the fence, in the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur, Mexico. The one dealing with California is linked below.
Bishop Michael Phạm Minh Cường's stated mission to restore trust in his diocese is a challenge being faced by the Church globally, as a poll published almost simultaneously in Poland proves.
There, one finds a story already too familiar in other European and Latin American countries with large Catholic populations: a jaw-breaking drop in trust in the Catholic Church that comes together with a similarly astounding loss of the moral authority that such Church used to have there.
As reported by Our Sunday Visitor, “the Polish Institute for Market and Social Research Foundation, or IBRiS, released the poll — conducted for the Polish Press Agency Sept. 18, noting that the total percentage of people who declare trust (“strongly” or “rather strongly”) in the Catholic Church plummeted by over 22 percent — and has fallen from 58 percent in September 2016 to 35.1 percent in the same month in 2025.”
Latin American challenges
In Latin America, we are weeks away from the publication of the most recent wave (2025) of the Latinobarómetro poll, the best there is in the region when trying to figure out how the region has changed since the mid-1990s.
As in Poland and many other countries over the last 30 years or so, the Latinobarómetro data attest to an abrupt fall in the levels of trust in institutions.
Sadly, unlike what happens with more specific polls that allow to actually differentiate the effect for the Catholic Church Latinobarómetro’s data is challenging when it comes to religion.
Besides polls with specific questions on the issue such as IBRiS’ in Poland, there is the so-called General Social Survey (GSS) regularly conducted in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Latinobarómetro’s main problem with data on religion is that, unlike the aforementioned GSS in other countries, it does not allow to thoroughly understand the changes in religious affiliation, since it lacks questions about changes in religious identity or affiliation in the course of life.
Also, the subsamples of non-Catholics are extremely small. That makes very difficult to figure out how much the patterns of Catholics differ or are similar to those observed among non-Catholics.
Finally, Latinobarómetro’s design poses another challenge, since it is anybody’s guess if the question on trust in the “church” refers to the Catholic Church or if some kind of mental gymnastics is necessary to figure out if it is about churches at large or, even worse, about religion at large.
Since there is a question regarding religious self-identification or membership, it would be possible to figure out if the patterns for Catholics are significantly different from those observed for non-Catholics, but that is a daunting task, so any assertion regarding the differences between Catholics and non-Catholics should be taken with a monumental “grain of salt”.
In Mexico, to name one possible example in 1996, the total sample was 1,526 cases, with 1,255 of them being Catholic. That leaves a “subsample” of 271 non-Catholic cases. In 2024, the total sample shrank to 1,200 and even if the non-Catholics “subsample” grew to 380 cases, it would be extremely risky to say anything meaningful about them, because it includes a universe extremely complex and diverse. From practicing Mexican Mormons in rural Chihuahua or equally devout Presbyterians in Chiapas, to non-believers in Mexico City or Tijuana.
The 2024 edition of Latinobarómetro, only has in its sample two Mormons,40 individuals claiming to be unaffiliated, 58 who belong to some kind of Evangelical or Protestant Church, and 178 persons declaring no religion at all, and an assortment of cases with other religious identities. It is impossible to perform robust analysis with that kind of subsamples.
True, the minimum for a subsample of a large population is near that 380 number, but even if one was willing to assume a non-Catholic religious “bloc” in Mexico, the fact that 178 out of the 380 declare lacking a religious identity makes very hard to say something meaningful about the non-Catholic “bloc,” since in Latin America, as in the United States, Canada, and many other countries all over the world, there is a significant growth of populations leaving organized religion.
Latinobarómetro’s questionnaire only has three items related to religion. One, about religious membership (S_701), a second related to religious attendance (S_702), and a third one dealing with trust in something Latinobarómetro encompasses in the word “church,” (H_002_101).
The so-called Integrated Dictionary reports those and all the variables that have been used over the almost 30 years Latinobarómetro has been mapping social change in Latin America is available here.
And this is not a criticism on Latinobarómetro methods. I am sure they face severe financial restrictions and almost positive that, if possible, they would want to have polling with larger samples. It is only a reflection of the state of art in Latin America when compared to the extremely robust samples of the GSS in Canada, Europe, or the United States.
For the United States, the so-called GSS is available here.
As for Canada, the data for its five-year waves is available here. The main concern reveals on its own the effect of loss of trust in institutional forms of religion: the massive emergence of the so-called Nones, people with no religious affiliation, as reflected in the papers available, mostly in English, with some of them only in French, over the page of the Canadian Research Data Centre, here.
The European GSS, is available with data and different types of papers, reports, and notes on different issues here. It is noticeable the interest the researchers there put in the relationship between religious practice and identity and political radicalization.
Loss of trust
Putting these issues aside, if the overall numbers coming from Latinobarómetro prove something is that the days of robust trust in the Catholic Church and more broadly speaking of trust in organized religion are gone.
From Mexico to Argentina and Chile, there is evidence of a massive destruction of trust, what some call, in certain contexts, social capital. Granted, the evidence of the losses is far worse in Chile.
Despite that issue, the way Latinobarómetro works makes it very easy to compare data on certain issues. Although the series formally starts in 1995, the comparisons cannot go all the way back because there is data only for a handful of countries.
The safest way is to start with the second poll of the series (1996). There, the only country in the sample where what Latinobarómetro encompasses under the category of “church” appeared as sporting a relatively low, for old Latin American standards, level of trust was Uruguay.
Back then 56 percent of their inhabitants talked about having “a lot” or “some” trust in “the church” with similar results in 2005 (see the graph above), by 2015 Uruguay was already below 50 percent, and even if by 2024, the latest on the series, the data for the “no trust” category had some improvement, the summation of “a lot” and “some” trust in the Church for 2024 was still under 50 percent.
Despite the marked differences between Uruguay and the rest of the region, the story is similar in all the other Latin American countries. It is impossible to go here over all the countries in the Latinobarómetro series, as it would make the comparison almost impossible to follow. By restricting the analysis to seven of the most representative countries in the region it is possible better appreciate the trends in the region.
Losing my religion
In Argentina (see the graph below) there was a small reduction in the number of people answering they have “no trust” in whatever is that thing called “the church” in 2024 as compared to the whole series. However, this allows one to think of some compensation, since those answering “a lot” or “some” in 2024 are almost a half of those saying so in 1996.
In Brazil the situation is similar to Argentina, although the losses there in the category “a lot” are more pronounced. In 1995, four in each ten Brazilians claimed having “a lot” of trust in “the church”. By 2024, that figure was dwarfed to little less than ten percent, as the graph below proves.
As a mirror, those claiming “no trust” in 1995 were 7.7 percent of the adult population and by 2024 three in each ten Brazilians declared having “no trust” in “the church.”
In Chile, the situation is probably the direst in the region. Back in 1996, little over 40 percent of Chileans over 18 declared having “a lot” of “trust in the church.” Almost three decades after, in 2024, it was less than ten percent, an abyssal 9.8 percent of the adult population in Chile.
As the graph before this paragraph shows, the losses in the number of people declaring “a lot” of trust in “the church” almost mirror the number of people declaring to have “no trust.” That number ballooned from 7.7 percent in 1996 to 30.5 percent in 2024.
In Colombia, there was an odd increase in the number of adults who were willing to declare having “a lot” of trust in the Church in 2005. Back then the number reached a peak of over 52.3 percent, perhaps the reflection of the role of the Church to pacify what was and still is a very violent country.
However, as the graph above proves, by 2024 whatever combustible was behind that peak was lost and now only 31.2 percent of adult Colombians report having “a lot” of trust in “the church.”
Granted, the number of those having no trust has not grown as much as in other countries, but the trend is clear as the graph before this paragraph proves.
In Mexico, the trend is not that much different. Back in 1996, when adding those declaring to have “a lot” and “some” trust in “the church” one would get little less than 73 percent, with only 10.5 percent having “no trust.”
By 2024 (see the graph above), when adding “a lot” and “some” the result was less than 52 percent of adult Mexicans, with 20.4 percent, almost the double of the total reported in 1996 declaring to have “no trust” in the church.
In Peru the numbers are similar. Back in 1996, 78 percent of adult Peruvians were willing to declare having “a lot” or “some” trust in the church. In 2024, see the graph below, the number is little over 64 percent, and those having “no trust” went from 5.6 to 13.1 percent, so only the diehards will see it as good news.
Not your old cliché
They do not always do it for the old cliché of the radical anarcho-atheist or the equally radical Marxist-atheist. Some of them are deeply spiritual persons, with complex spiritual practices akin to the kind of religious discipline one finds in strict religions, but they do it in either very small groups, or on their own.
Another way to measure the effects would be paying attention to the data available on religious affiliation. For this variable it is possible to go back to 1995, as there is data for the all the seven countries considered here.
The graph before this paragraph shows, and the table a bit below offers the summary of the kind of changes that have happened in Latin America when dealing with the issue of religious affiliation.
There, the worst-case scenario is that of Brazil, with a loss of almost one third of the total, while the losses seem to have been controlled, at least for the time being, in Mexico, with a loss of little less than nine percent.
But even in Uruguay, where the situation was already bad, it got worse, since on this measurement the Catholic Church lost little more than half its faithful.
In any case, out of those, some of the most representative countries in Latin America, there is no one single story of success for the Catholic Church over the less than three decades covered by the Latinobarómetro series.
Even if there is “no smoking gun,” a single large scale multinational poll to prove the effects of abuse on trust and affiliation, one does not need that kind of knowledge to figure out, to connect the dots of how the clergy sexual abuse crisis affects the levels of trust in the institution.
It is hard to imagine a survivor and their relatives ever fully trusting the institution again. Even those back in the flock, and I know such cases, express regret about their willingness to accept at face value whatever a priest or a bishop were willing to throw their way.
Where the scandal forced large mobilizations not only in cosmopolitan Santiago de Chile, but even in rather isolated small cities such as Osorno, it is hard to forget how until the bitter end Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa protected Fernando Karadima, and his own cousin, at some point a bishop of La Serena Francisco José Cox Huneeus, who resigned in silence in 1997 and was shipped to Germany to live in some sort of golden exile until, in 2018, he was laicized by Pope Francis after the Argentinean Pontiff had in Chile a disastrous pastoral visit that year.
More so, as both Errázuriz Ossa and Cox Hunneeus were also members of the so-called Institute of Schönstatt Fathers, an organization akin to an order, with a history of its own of abusive clergy in South America and Germany.
It would require a whole book to go over the many other cases of Chilean clergy who ruined whatever good will existed towards the Catholic Church there. These include prominent figures, from social justice “warriors” Renato Poblete and Felipe Berríos, both Jesuits, to Marcial Maciel's Irish disciple, Legionary of Christ John O'Reilly.
Single cause?
It is impossible to prove causation. That is to say, it is impossible to actually prove that there is a direct link between the ongoing, three-decade long, clergy sexual abuse crisis in the region and the plummeting of trust in what Latinobarómetro encapsulates in the notion of “church”.
More so as the loss of trust cannot be attributed to a single cause or a single religious institution. Not all cases of clergy sexual abuse come from the Catholic Church. In Mexico, there is the notorious case of the Luz del Mundo (Light of the World) Church, originally born in Jalisco, in Western Mexico, from where it spawned into California and other states in the United States and in several countries in Central and South America.
They are known for their predatory practices and their ability to curry favor from the Mexican political elites, even the current, allegedly “leftist” national government is more than to turn a blind eye to said practices in exchange for the votes the Luz del Mundo leaders are able to force their faithful to cast in whatever election happens in Mexico.
More troublingly, over the last week, a potential link between the Luz del Mundo Church and the terrorist organization Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación emerged in a sleepy town in rural Michoacán, in Western Mexico, as the story linked after proves.
As stated there, consistently, it has been the U.S. state and federal authorities who have been uncovering the extent of the damage and abuse perpetrated by the leaders of the Luz del Mundo Church.
That fact tells all one needs to know about how blind is the Mexican government is on these issues and how all the rhetoric about the so-called “lay state” serves them well when celebrating on March 21 of each year Benito Juárez’s birthday as a foundation myth of the country, but nothing else.
The failure of both the Catholic Church, with practices such as the so-called “Ratzinger system” putting the emphasis on denying and avoiding as much as possible the enforcement of any meaningful punishment of predatory clerics and of the political institutions unwilling to pay the political price of losing docile voting blocks has contributed to a seismic shift in the religious landscape.
In Argentina, the local Network of Survivors of those Abused by Clergy, recently issued an alert (opens contents in Spanish) regarding the reports filed in local precincts in the Rosario province about the practices of Walter Rojas, and the same can be said in Central America and Andean countries such as Bolivia and Peru, where there is a volatile religious market undermining the overwhelming Catholic majorities of yore.
In Colombia, little over a year ago, there was this case at Valle del Cauca (contents in Spanish), and back in April of this year, another one in Medellín (contents in Spanish).
In Peru, back in June 2023, José Luis Linares Cerón, an Evangelical preacher with deep links to the Peruvian Catholic far-right through the movement Don’t touch my kids (Con mis hijos no the metas, originally born in Spain as a spin-off of the Yunque) was charged with the sexual abuse of his own daughter. The Yunque has been the subject of previous installments of this series, the most recent linked after this paragraph.
Linares Cerón abused for over nine years his daughter since she was 7. He impregnated her at 12 and 15, forcing her to carry to term the pregnancies in both cases. His brother Robert was an accomplice in the sexual abuse of her own daughter.
Linares Cerón’s impunity was the byproduct of his involvement in politics. As recently as January of 2025, he was congratulated by the national minister of Education in Peru, Morgan Quero (contents in Spanish), who praised Linares Cerón.
Back in 2013, another female accused Linares Cerón of sexually abusing her when she was underage in 1991. As it is common in Latin America, the case is still open, with little or no expectation of a solution. As it is possible to expect, Linares Cerón’s impunity, most probably a byproduct of his deep ties with the Peruvian political class, does not help the trust on organized religion in Peru and elsewhere in the region.
Also, it must be noted that, unlike Catholicism where there are several layers of hierarchical authority over him, Linares Cerón is his own boss, as it is usually the case in many small Evangelical denominations, so the chances of actual institutional accountability are significantly smaller.
But there lies a key issue with the response from the Catholic Church, because despite its larger structure, its alleged adherence to a long-standing set of rules to deal with the issue, its inability to actually be accountable and to provide relief to its victims, prove there is no actual advantage, while the risks coming from its ability to use its political muscle are larger.
Demographic change
According to the 2024 Latinobarómetro survey, Honduras has a 36 percent Catholic population, while Guatemala has 39 percent. These are indeed among the lowest in the region, with the only exception being Uruguay, which has a 36 percent Catholic population (33 according to Latinobarómetro) and has a much higher rate of “unaffiliated” people.
Nothing seems to put a hold on the trends leading to this sort of new reality that the Catholic Church is not actually addressing when instead of coming clean and addressing the major issues affecting its credibility, insists in retelling its own story in the key of victimhood.
Granted, even before the explosion of the clergy sexual abuse crisis back in the mid-1980s when Jason Berry exposed the many abuses in dioceses of the state of Louisiana, there were other trends furthering the dissolution of the large Catholic majority in Latin America.
In 1944, Alberto Hurtado, now a saint of the Catholic Church, was fired and humiliated by the Chilean bishops angry at his decision to publish a book now prophetic titled Is Chile a Catholic country? (¿Es Chile un país católico?) where he stressed the issues of loss of trust in the Catholic hierarchy in a very unequal country.
Twelve years later, with Hurtado already demoted to less prominent positions, his heirs at the helm of the Catholic magazine Mensaje published the first analysis of national census data showing a large exodus of Catholics to other Christian denominations, proving Hurtado’s thesis in his 1944 book right.
However, it would be naïve to assume that the current numbers on religious membership and trust in the region are not, even if partially, a reflection of a lack of will of the Catholic leadership to actually enact internal reform on the clergy sexual abuse crisis, while trying to shift focus to blame external factors such as modernity, or “gender ideology,” the unwillingness of the LGTBQ community to accept being second rate citizens, or going for the old trick of retelling the abominable lone predator tale to “explain” clergy sexual abuse.
Evidence of that attitude comes from the fact that even Pope Francis’s timid attempts at reform and change were a daunting proposition for many bishops unwilling to drop the victim role they love to play.
Last year, the story linked above proved the dismal response to Pope Francis’s request to all national conferences of Catholic bishops to set up at least one commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse in each diocese.
And as told last week when dealing with Pope Leo XIV’s interview with U.S. medium Crux, his decision to cast doubt on the legitimacy of ten percent of clergy sexual abuse claims lead survivors’ organizations in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds to criticize his commitment to addressing the issue, further undermining any expectation of a potential long-term solution to it, as the story linked above told.
What is worse, it opened a reconsideration of his own handling of sexual abuse case in Chiclayo, the Peruvian diocese where he served before becoming Cardinal under Pope Francis (see the story linked below).
Back in October 2024, this series went over some of the data available in Germany and Austria from the German think-tank Research Group on Worldviews (Forschungsgruppe Weltanschauungen in Deutschland). The patterns are almost identical.
Also almost identical is the data considered at the time for Latin America coming from surveys by the Pew Research Center dealing with favorable views, from 2013 through 2024, of now deceased Pope Francis. The information is available in the section titled “Torschlusspanik: Fear of the closing door.” The story is available after this paragraph.
Post Data
When this story was already finished, news emerged from Rome about the first forced resignation of a bishop during Leo XIV’s Papacy. It was Ciro Quispe López, 52, the now emeritus bishop of Juli, Peru. As usual, the information is sketchy and scarce.
In the Vatican’s daily Bollettino, one sentence summarizes the situation. One has to go over other sources to find out that it was about financial mismanagement and sexual misconduct but there is nothing official about those “charges.”
When one goes over Quispe López’s page at Catholic-Hierarchy it is hard to spot any issue beyond the age of the bishop when he resigned.
Unless one moves from his, to the diocese’s page. There one will notice that Juli has now two emeriti, oddly enough they are both under 75. Quispe López’s predecessor, José María Ortega Trinidad, was one of the many bishops forced out of office in Peru and elsewhere by Pope Francis.
The Argentine pontiff forced Ortega Trinidad out of office in 2018, when he was only 67, to appoint Quispe López. In that regard, unless one is a Pope Francis’s diehard fan, it is hard not to question the very process to appoint Quispe López. Even more, it is hard not think if the cure is worse than the disease.
In Peru the government will keep paying them a salary, because that is the nature of the State-Church relationship there, but in any other country without such kind of provisions, the diocese would be forced to pay them as now they are both emeriti. What is worse, as emeritus Quispe López will be free to do whatever he wants, as Rome set no restrictions on his ministry.
Or did it? Because we know the story of the secret “punishments” or “penalties” set on misbehaving bishops and Cardinals. Early this year, the emeritus archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorné decided to defy the “penalties” set on him by Pope Francis.
Revealing one of the core issues behind the clergy sexual abuse crisis, Cipriani Thorné did so by playing victim. The story linked below, from January of this year, went over the details of his case in the section “Lima-Madrid-Rome axis.”
In that regard, what used to be seen as the ultimate punishment for a sitting bishop, forcing him out of office, is now some sort of routine. Early this year, this series published a story about the 30 bishops Pope Francis forced out of office in the last two years of his life.
What is worse, there is a chance some of those resignations are not the byproduct of abuse, but in the current scenario of distrust as the byproduct of the clergy sexual abuse crisis it is really hard to figure out why the resignations happen. In that sense, far from acting as an actual punishment, these forced resignations are a perverse way to reward abuse.
That is the case of Argentine bishop Gustavo Zanchetta whose case was behind an interview I had with a survivor from that country, linked at the end of this piece. He got the benefit of an early release from what was already an extremely light punishment for the abuse of seminarians in his former diocese of Orán.
His sentence was already laughable, a mere four and a half years. He was serving it at a facility owned by the Catholic Church, with little or no actual supervision and, on Friday September 26, he got the benefit of early parole, contradicting the stance of the district attorney and the judge in his trial.
It is actually hard to think how news like these from Peru and Argentina could foster instead of undermining what is left of the trust in the Catholic Church in those two countries and in the region at large.