Within the framework of its 70th anniversary, the Latin American and Caribbean Episcopal Council (CELAM) has presented a new digital platform, which contains data on the presence and action of the Catholic Church in the region.
The institution has described this new tool as “one of its greatest bets of recent times.” The data can be consulted freely through the platform website.
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“This is an innovative interactive web platform designed to explore through graphics, comparative tables and interactive tools, 70 indicators of the 22 episcopal conferences that make up CELAM,” They explain on its official website.
In the new data viewer, the statistics of each of the Latin American and Caribbean episcopates can be consulted, from 1970 to 2020. In Mexico, for example, for 1970 there were more than 8,500 priests. In 2020, that figure reached 17,300 presbyters.
For 1970, there were 303 seminarians throughout Peru. The figure increased considerably by 2020, becoming more than 1,000 men who prepared for the priesthood. The same trend is repeated in Venezuela, where by 1970 there were only 156 seminarians; Today more than 1,100 candidates make life in the country.
This initiative was developed thanks to the work of a group of specialists assigned to the CELAM Knowledge Management Center, and the data contained there were extracted from the Annual Statistics Eccleasiaewhich are edited annually by the Central Statistics Office of the Holy See, since 1969.
Guillermo Sandoval, director of the Knowledge Management Center, assured that the data viewer is the result of extensive investigation, carried out in two phases (April 2022 – March 2023 and April 2024 – March 2025), entitled The mission of the Church in the countries of Latin Americawith the support of the socio -anthropological and pastoral observatory (OSAP).
“This is an example of how the application of information and communication technologies is put at the service of evangelization,” Sandoval said.
The institution ensures that this new platform responds to one of the objectives of its Global Plan 2023-2027, which invites “recognizing ourselves as a church called to be a compassionate and transformative fraternity in the heart of a wounded world”, by allowing free, unlimited access and with high standards of relevant information quality of the entire Latin American and Caribbean Church.
The data viewer will be officially presented this July 25, the date on which the first general conference of Latin American bishops is commemorated, 70 years ago in Rio de Janeiro, which gave rise to this body.
The presentation will be made through an online event, scheduled at 5:00 pm in Colombia, which will be transmitted through Facebook y YouTube. Several experts who collaborated in the creation of the data viewer will participate, including Jeanette Rincón, OSAP coordinator.
Corner explained That this tool “not only offers visualizations by region and country, but also individual reports for each episcopal conference, facilitating pastoral reflection and the design of strategies that respond to current challenges.”
“This effort has been complemented with a rigorous theoretical-pastoral analysis of existing indicators, as well as proposals for improvement, from workshops carried out with specialists from different Latin American contexts,” he said.
Andrés Henríquez
I was born in Caracas in 1996. I am a writer for ACI Press and correspondent of EWTN since 2023. Since then, I cover events of the Catholic Church in Venezuela, Latin America and the world. I have more than 6 years of experience in bilingual media. In addition, in Venezuela I have worked from various fields for freedom and respect for fundamental rights in the country. I am a member of the Regnum Christi Federation since 2014.