Definition
The Roman Catholic church is the world’s largest Christian church with about 1.2 billion adherents. It is hierarchical and led by the bishop of Rome, the pope, who is the chief bishop in a church ordered in some 2800 dioceses led by local bishops. Approximately 40 % of all Catholics live in Latin America. Iberians introduced Roman Catholicism to “Latin America” when Spain and Portugal conquered and colonized their respective New World empires after 1500. Missionaries attempted with varied success to convert Amerindians and enslaved Africans from their belief systems and to make Catholicism the only religion practiced in colonial Ibero-America. Despite the growth of Protestantism, African-inspired religions, and other religious expressions in the twentieth century, about eighty percent of Latin Americans today adhere to Roman Catholicism, as suggested in Table 1.
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Penyak, L.M., Petry, W.J. (2015). Roman Catholicism in Latin America. In: Gooren, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Latin American Religions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08956-0_179-1
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