Latest Stats on Church from the Annuario

[HagiaSophia]

The statistics furnished by the Annuario run through the end of 2003. Those figures show 1.086 billion baptized Catholics in the world-- up from 1.071 billion in 2002. The number of Catholics grew by 4.5 percent in Africa, by 2.2 percent in Asia, and by a bit over 1 percent in the Americas and Oceania; in Europe the number remained virtually stable.

Very nearly half of the world’s Catholics-- 49.8 percent-- now live in the Western hemisphere. Europe accounts for 25.8 percent; Africa 13.2 percent, Asia 10.4 percent, and Oceania 0.8 percent.

There were 405,450 priests worldwide (268,041 diocesan and 137,409 religious) in 2003; for the previous year the number had been 405,058. Thus there was a net increase of 392 priests. The number of ordinations also rose slightly__ from 9,247 in 2002 to 9,317 in 2003. However, the future looks less promising, with the number of seminarians falling slightly, from 112,643 to 112,373.

Among the world’s seminarians, 37,191 were studying in the Americas, 27,931 in Asia; 24,387 in Europe; 21,909 in Africa; and 955 in Oceania.

cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=34988

 

[HagiaSophia]

George Weigel on Christianity in Europe
The first is the good news: As a global phenomenon, Christianity is by no means withering away under the assault of modernization; the only exception is Europe, where Christian decline is the rule. The not-so-good news, from the point of view of Matthew 28: 19 and the “Great Commission” (“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…”), is that Christianity’s impressive absolute growth in the last century is not matched by its relative growth: Christianity claims a slightly smaller percentage of world population today than it did in 1900.

Of the 6.4 billion people on Planet Earth, some 2.1 billion, or 33.1 percent, are Christians of one sort or another. As there were only some 558 million Christians in the world in 1900, the absolute growth of Christianity is, as I say, impressive. But because world population has grown at a somewhat faster pace than Christianity, Christianity’s relative position has slipped a bit since 1900, when Christians represented some 34.5 percent of world population…"

“…Europe, including Russia, still claims the largest absolute number of Christians (531 million); but Europe is also the only continent where Christian numbers are declining now and will likely decline for the foreseeable future. Latin America claims the second largest number of Christians (511 million), while Africa (2.36 percent growth per year) and Asia (2.64 percent growth per year) are the fastest growing parts of the Christian world. …”

the-tidings.com/2005/0204/difference.htm

 

[Fortiterinre]

Thank you for posting this! It is encouraging, and it is downright exciting to see the growth of the Church in Africa and Asia. I always wonder who counts as a “seminarian,” because sometimes tabulations only count students at major seminaries (graduate schools), and sometimes of these only those who have received candidacy and are a year or two into the seminary program already. But still generally good news!