Venezuela is Catholic by a wide margin on paper, with a steadily growing evangelical minority, and it has one of the lowest rates of observance in the region. The gap between affiliation and practice is filled by devotions that the hierarchy does not control.
The best known is the cult of Jose Gregorio Hernandez, a physician who died in a street accident in Caracas in 1919 and whose reputation for treating the poor without charge produced a popular veneration that never waited for official approval. His image, in a dark suit and hat, is on altars, taxi dashboards and hospital walls across the country, and he is invoked for healing above all. Rome beatified him in 2021, a century after his death, which ratified a cult the population had already established.
The other is the tradition centred on Maria Lionza, which is genuinely Venezuelan in composition and has no exact parallel elsewhere.
The institutional church has been in open conflict with the state for most of the period since 1999. Bishops have denounced government policy and been denounced in turn from the presidential podium, and the Vatican's attempts at mediation in the political crisis produced no settlement. The church has meanwhile become a principal provider of food and medicine through Caritas during the humanitarian emergency, which has given it standing that political opposition parties lost.
Emigration on a very large scale has carried Venezuelan devotions across the region, and shrines to Jose Gregorio Hernandez and to Maria Lionza now exist in Colombia, Peru, Spain and the United States.