{"id":7569,"date":"2004-04-02T07:38:58","date_gmt":"2004-04-02T07:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/catholicism_in_brazil.html"},"modified":"2004-04-02T07:38:58","modified_gmt":"2004-04-02T07:38:58","slug":"catholicism_in_brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/catholicism_in_brazil.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholicism in Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Nod and a Shrug<\/a><\/p>\n

”Something happened over the past decade and, yes, it worries us,” says Bishop Odilo Scherer, secretary general of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops Conference.<\/p>\n

What happened, according to the Brazilian Census Bureau, was a major decline in the percentage of Catholics in Brazil’s population — which fell from 84 percent in 1991 to 74 percent in 2000.<\/p>\n

While Brazil, with 178 million inhabitants, is nominally the world’s largest Catholic country, its fervor can be less than overwhelming. In 2001, a survey by The Religious and Social Studies Center, a Rio de Janeiro academic group, found that only a third of declared Catholics in Brazilian cities practiced their religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Nod and a Shrug ”Something happened over the past decade and, yes, it worries us,” says Bishop Odilo Scherer, secretary general of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops Conference. What happened, according to the Brazilian Census Bureau, was a major decline in the percentage of Catholics in Brazil’s population — which fell from 84 percent in 1991…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholicism in Brazil - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/catholicism_in_brazil.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholicism in Brazil - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A Nod and a Shrug ”Something happened over the past decade and, yes, it worries us,” says Bishop Odilo Scherer, secretary general of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops Conference. What happened, according to the Brazilian Census Bureau, was a major decline in the percentage of Catholics in Brazil’s population — which fell from 84 percent in 1991…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/catholicism_in_brazil.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-04-02T07:38:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Catholicism in Brazil - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/catholicism_in_brazil.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Catholicism in Brazil - Via Media","og_description":"A Nod and a Shrug ”Something happened over the past decade and, yes, it worries us,” says Bishop Odilo Scherer, secretary general of Brazil’s Catholic Bishops Conference. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}