A new report released Wednesday finds that more Hispanics in the United States are leaving the Catholic Church.

According to a new Pew Research Center study, a large number of Hispanics in the U.S. are leaving Catholicism to become evangelical Christian or religiously unaffiliated, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church has counted on Hispanics to increase its numbers since the 1990s, when many Hispanics emigrated to the states. However, the study that was released suggests Hispanics, the second fastest-growing population in the country, are abandoning the religious institution in droves.

The percentage of U.S. Hispanics who are Catholics dropped 12 points in four years to 55 percent. Nearly one in four Hispanic adults in the states is now a "former" Catholic, and a greater proportion also identify as Protestant or unaffiliated.

The trend in the United States reflects similar trends in Mexico, Brazil and other Latin American countries, where evangelical Christian denominations have begun to take the place of Catholicism. In a larger sense, Catholicism has been losing followers in the U.S. from every ethnicity, and there are a great number of people who now identify as religiously unaffiliated.

However, there are still more Hispanic Catholics than Protestant in the U.S. as a whole. About 48 percent of the U.S. public is Protestant, compared with 22 percent of Hispanics, while only 22 percent of the general population identifies as Catholic.

While the percentage of Hispanic Catholics is on the decline, Hispanics still make up a large portion of all U.S. Catholics, about one-third of the total. The rapid growth of the Hispanic population is adding to the number of Catholics, with Hispanics accounting for 17 percent of the U.S. population.

"If such trends continue, a day could come when a majority of Catholics in the U.S. will be Hispanic even if the majority of Hispanics might no longer be Catholic," said Alan Cooperman, Pew's religion-research director.

Half of the country's 35.4 million Hispanic adults were born in another country, and about 30 percent of that population has changed religious affiliation. Half say they changed prior to setting in the U.S., and the other half says they changed religious affiliations after moving to the United States.

Pastor Luis Linan Olivera, a Peruvian immigrant, helped co-found Seventh-Day Adventist churches that cater to Spanish-speaking immigrants in Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia. Olivera, who now runs a large church in Hollywood, said that many of his congregants are former Catholics.

Miriam Alvarez, a former Roman Catholic, said she is drawn by the more participatory aspect of evangelism. Alvarez, a Mexican immigrant, said that "praying here with my brethren has helped me solve problems."

She believes her praying helped cure the asthma of her 7-year-old son, Darwin. Each week, she brings her son to church to participate in the church's children's programs.

The Pew study is based on a survey conducted between May and July of 2013 among a sample of 5,103 Hispanic adults, both in English and Spanish.