THE LATIN AMERICAN EXODUS: Catholics become Protestants in Droves.

What happened exactly in the 1960s? . . .

It is always affirmed by those who say that the collapse in almost all Catholic indicators that followed the Second Vatican Council was a coincidence that the 1960s and 1970s were an era of strong secularization and that the collapse would have happened anyway.

Well, that would explain the collapse in Western Europe, North America, and Australia. But in Latin America (where the current pope studied to be a priest during the 1960s, being ordained in December 1969), what happened instead during the same period was an intense religious revival. But instead of it being channeled through the traditional structures of Catholic life, these same traditional structures were being dismantled by the Latin American hierarchy inebriated with the spirit of aggiornamento, and Latin Americans, who just wanted pure religious life, converted in droves to Protestantism, the only “space” in which they could find signs of the Christian message.