Chile

Chile remains majority Catholic, around 55 to 60 percent by most recent estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, though the share has declined substantially in recent decades as Protestant, chiefly evangelical, communities have grown to around 15 to 17 percent and religiously unaffiliated Chileans now form a large and rapidly growing minority approaching a quarter of the population. Spanish colonization from the mid-sixteenth century brought Catholic missionary activity across most of Chile, though the Mapuche people of the south successfully resisted conquest for over three centuries, preserving their own religious tradition centered on machi shamanic healers and a wider spiritual order called ngen, and Mapuche religious practice, including the Nguillatun fertility and thanksgiving ceremony, persists today alongside and sometimes blended with Catholic practice.

Chile's Catholic Church held close ties to conservative political power through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and under Augusto Pinochet's 1973 to 1990 dictatorship the Church's Vicariate of Solidarity became a significant, internationally documented institutional voice defending human rights and documenting abuses even as some individual clergy were themselves implicated in supporting or benefiting from the regime.

Chile's Catholic Church suffered a severe and rapid loss of institutional credibility following revelations of clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up, most prominently the case of priest Fernando Karadima, whose decades of documented abuse the Vatican initially handled with visible leniency before Pope Francis, after his own 2018 visit to Chile drew widespread public criticism and initially defended a bishop accused of covering up Karadima's crimes, reversed course, apologized publicly and accepted the resignations of numerous Chilean bishops in an unprecedented mass response. This scandal accelerated an already underway secularization trend, and Chile's 1980 Pinochet-era constitution, still substantially in force after failed replacement attempts in 2022 and 2023 referenda, maintains separation of church and state without an established religion, guaranteeing religious freedom under a framework dating to the 1925 Chilean constitution's original disestablishment of Catholicism as official state religion.

Chile has since become one of Latin America's more socially liberal Catholic-heritage countries, legalizing same-sex civil unions in 2015 and marriage in 2022, and decriminalizing abortion in limited circumstances in 2017, changes reflecting the declining direct political influence of a church still recovering from its credibility crisis.