Children in Brazil, which has the highest Catholic population, celebrate the Festa do Divino (Miradas.com.br)

Catholic church demographics have been heading south for the past 100 years, according to the New York Times. A February report by the Pew Research Center found that Brazil and Mexico have the highest Catholic populations in the world, and that Latin America and the Caribbean have the highest share of Catholics, at 39%. The election of the "First Global Pontiff," as the Atlantic dubbed Francis, reflects that trend. 

As the leader of one of the world's oldest and most powerful independent organizations, the Pope has tremendous political power. It remains to be seen whether a Latin American Pope will wield that power differently than a European, or what effect, if any, the fact of a Latin American Pope will have on global power dynamics. 

Another new leader from the South, the lawyer Fatou Bensouda of Gambia, was recently appointed Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. Scholars and journalists are engaged in ongoing discussions about what some see as a larger trend of a redistribution of power away from the Global North and toward the Global South. 

Analysts at the United Nations Development Program point to the growth of trade between Southern countries as part of this redistribution. "The economic center of gravity is inexorably moving toward the developing South," stated Hardeep S. Puri for the World Bank Institute.  Al-Jazeera's "The Stream" took this a step further, with an episode entitled "Rise of the Global South" which posed the question, "As economic power shifts to the developing world, will politics follow?" 

The National Intelligence Council's report "Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds" indicates that the answer may be a resounding yes. Predicting that by 2030, "Asia will have surpassed North America and Europe combined in terms of global power," the NIC also forecasts a "definitive shift of economic power to the East and South."

[Paddy Ashdown's TED talk on the global power shift]

For more TED talks on shifting global power, go here.

To read several religious leaders' and theologians' perspective on religion and the Global South, go here.

Reach Executive Producer Lauren Madow here. Follow her here.