More than two years after the launch of Pokémon Go, a Catholic group has launched its own version the mobile gaming sensation that it hopes will lure children to the religion.

Follow JC Go uses the same GPS-tracking and augmented reality (AR) technology as Pokémon Go, though rather than tracking different Pokémon creatures, players have to capture saints and other biblical characters.

The copycat app has gameplay that is strikingly similar to Pokémon Go and even has the blessing of Pope Francis.

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The Catholic Church will be hoping that Follow JC Go will be able to replicate the success of Pokémon Go, which since launching in July 2016 has been downloaded more than 500 million times and generated more than $2 billion in revenue worldwide.

"Never has the Church had a project like this. This is the Catholic app with the most advanced technology there is," Ricardo Grzona, executive director of the Foundation Ramon Pane, told Crux Now.

"Everything today, language and relations, among young people, go through smartphones. We wanted to be there and propose to them an educational video game, that is religious and interactive, and with which they can form evangelization teams."

Follow JC Go swaps Pikachu for Saint Peter (Follow JC Go)

Grzona added that Pope Francis is "not a very technological person" but supported the idea of combining technology with evangelization.

Honduran Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga, who serves as the president of the Foundation Ramon Pane, told the publication: "We speak a lot about young people and technology, a more modern language. What young people want is to be active in taking the Gospel also to technology and have fun, learn and be evangelized through these channels."

Pope Francis recently spoke about the challenges the Catholic Church faces in attracting young people, given the decades of child sex abuse scandals.

"They are upset by sexual and economic scandals that do not meet with clear condemnation, by our unpreparedness to really appreciate the lives and sensibilities of the young, and simply by the passive role we assign them," Pope Francis told a group of followers in Estonia last month.

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The app is likely to raise questions about whether it constitutes religious indoctrination of young people, with leading atheist and agnostic figures previously criticising attempts to force religion onto children.

In 2013, the academic Richard Dawkins said that raising a child within an organised religion like Catholicism was in itself equivalent to child abuse.

"What a child should be taught is that religious exists; that some people believe this and some people believe that," Professor Dawkins said at the Chipping Norton Literary Festival.