The towering Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro is apparently seeing a new picture of Brazil, one that may not bode well for the Roman Catholic Church.

According to a survey undertaken by the Datafolha polling institute from October 2104 to December 2016, Catholicism—the No. 1 Christian religion in the world—has lost at least nine million followers, or six percent of Brazilians over the age of 16.

In 2014, 60 percent of the Brazilian population of 200.4 million were identified as Catholics. This went down to 50 percent this year, the survey showed.

Considering the survey's margin of error of 2 percent, the decline totalled a minimum of 6 percent and a maximum of 14 percent, or the loss of about 20 million Catholics, equivalent to the population of Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city.

The survey also showed that the number of those who say they do not have a religion has more than doubled, rising from 6 percent to 14 percent.

The declining number of Catholics does not bode well for Catholicism's expansion in Brazil, according to Forbes.

Less Catholic faithful would mean less people would get married by priests, resulting in fewer newborn babies baptised as Catholics. The church does not baptise babies that were not born to parents married by Catholic priests, the Forbes report said.

Meanwhile, Brazil may soon have married priests, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

Pope Francis may soon grant a special request made by the Brazilian bishops' conference asking for the Catholic Church to allow married priests to resume their priestly ministry, liberation theologian Leonardo Boff said in a Dec. 25 interview in the German daily Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger.

"The Brazilian bishops, especially the pope's close friend Cardinal Claudio Hummes, have expressly requested Pope Francis to enable married priests in Brazil to return to their pastoral ministry," Boff said. "I have recently heard that the pope wants to fulfil this request — as an experimental, preliminary phase for the moment confined to Brazil."

Brazil is facing an acute shortage of priests. With its 140 million Catholics, Brazil needs at least 100,000 priests but it only has 1,800, which is a "catastrophe," Boff said.

The theologian linked the shortage of priest to the declining number of Catholics in the country.

"No wonder the faithful are going over to the evangelical churches or to the Pentecostals in droves, as they are filling the personnel vacuum. If the many thousands of priests who have married are once again allowed to practice their ministry, that would be a first step to improving the situation but at the same time also an impulse for the church to free itself of the fetters of celibacy," Boff said.