Growth of Evangelicals scare the Catholic Church!

The 335 bishops attending the 50th General Assembly of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) are frightened by the fall in the number of Catholics, whose share fell from 83.34% to 67.84% in the last 20 years, according to data collected the 2010 Census. These numbers are even more frightening according to information collected by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in predicting the Jesuit priest of Guertechin Thierry Lienard, the Brazilian Institute of Development (Ibrades), an organization linked to CNBB.
Father Thierry presented a framework for the episcopate of religions based on a survey of the Getulio Vargas Foundation and the Household Budget Surveys of the IBGE, the result of interviews with 200,000 households conducted before the census. "I certainly hope that there are some distortions are corrected by the IBGE statistics, he heard about 20 million Brazilians," said the director Ibrades.
The data available so far underestimate the fall in the percentage of Catholics and the growth of Pentecostal evangelical churches. "We lose people, because the absolute number of Catholics is growing, the figures have fallen, who tell the truth," said the Cardinal d.Hummes, former prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy in the Vatican and former archbishop of Sao Paulo. "Do not just make a beautiful theology in small groups, they were baptized Catholics who are not evangelized," the cardinal said the Mass of the bishops, on the morning of Friday, the Basilica of Aparecida.
Recalling that Pope Benedict XVI is concerned about the loss of faith or de-worldwide, beginning with Europe, d. Claudio said that "we must begin at the beginning" in the effort to ensure the endurance of the Catholic and reconquest of those who left the Church.
According to data presented by Father Thierry, evangelicals represent 21.93% of the population, while 6.72% said they did not say religion and 4.62% practice alternative religions. In his opinion, these percentages would have to be analyzed more rigorously, because they reflect a mixed picture in the denomination's beliefs.
 The term appears in seven Catholic churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, while evangelicals are identified with more than 40 denominations. The largest group after the Catholics is the Assembly of God, with 5.77%. "The number of followers of Edir Macedo, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, who appears with 1% in the polls is actually higher," Father Thierry estimates.
He also warns to another distortion factor, which is the multiplicity of religious practice, people claim to have heard in the polls a religion, but attending more than one church. This occurs with evangelicals and with spiritualists who call themselves Catholics.
Religious practice is baptized by something else that concerns the bishops. Practicing Catholics - those who go to Mass, receive the sacraments and participate in the community - are only 5%, or about 7 million in a universe estimated at just over 130 million faithful. Among evangelicals, the percentage is higher. Father Thierry gives value for the high rate of Catholics in the last decades of the 19th century, when its share in the population exceeded 99%.
It is good to remember the persecution at the time by african-Brazilian religions and prejudices suffered by Protestants, says the director of Ibrades. Looking back further in the religious formation of the Brazilian people, Father recalls Thierry New Christians or Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, who were also persecuted.