RIO DE JANEIRO -Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022 while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by statistics agency IBGE showed.

The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7% of the population, down from 65.1% or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census.

Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9% last year, up from 21.6% in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure on record.

The numbers may spell trouble to Brazil’s leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whose Workers Party has historically struggled to gain ground among evangelicals. A recent Quaest poll showed that while 45% of Catholics approved of the Lula administration, only 30% of evangelicals did.

The share of Catholics in Brazil has been dropping since the beginning of official records in 1872, when residents could only opt between Catholic or non-Catholic, said Maria Goreth Santos, an analyst of IBGE. Enslaved people, who made up a huge share of Brazil’s population at the time, were all counted as Catholics, regardless of their wishes, she added.

Still, Catholicism remains the country’s most popular religion – though the Vatican’s dominance varies in different regions, with fewer Catholics in the Amazon region, and more in the Northeast.

The new census data also revealed that the number of Brazilians who declare to have no religion rose to 9.3% from 7.9%, totaling 16.4 million people. Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Umbanda and Candomble, also gained ground, with the number of followers increasing from to 1% from 0.3%.

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