There had never been a Latin American pope despite that it is home to nearly half of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics but between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of Mexicans that identify as Catholic dropped from 88 to less than 83 — the largest fall recorded to date. Now that the new Pope is the place, can he save his church? Furthermore, the Vatican had been concerned about the remarkable decline of Catholicism throughout the region in the preceding decade. Vatican had once seen the area as a “continent of hope,” it now thought of it as a “continent of concern.”