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Catholic World News News Feature

Catholic population slightly up, annual report shows October 25, 2004

The world's Catholic population grew by 9.47 million in 2003, reach a total of 1.07 billion, according to a report released by the Vatican on World Mission Sunday.

The number of Catholics rose fastest in the Americas, where the Church added 6.2 million members. (The Vatican treats North and South America as a single continent for statistical purposes; the vast bulk of that growth came in South America.) Among the world's continents, only Europe saw a loss (of 674,000) in Catholic population

However the percentage of Catholics in the overall world population declined slightly: by roughly one-tenth of 1 percent. The drop in the percentage of Catholic population was, oddly enough, also greatest in America, with Protestant evangelists in Latin America helping to bring the overall Catholic representation down by 0.42 percent. Only Asia saw a very slight (0.01 percent) increase in Catholic representation.

These figures came from an annual report submitted by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the prefect of the Congregation for Evangelization. That Congregation, which monitors the work of the Church in the missionary territories, has supervisory jurisdiction over 40 percent of Catholic world. There are 1,081 ecclesiastical jurisdictions-- dioceses and archdioceses, apostolic administrations and vicariates-- that report to the Congregation for Evangelization. Of these, 153 lie within the "zone of silence" in which the Church cannot operate openly: in China, Cambodia, and North Korea.

The number of active priests in the world held almost perfectly steady, with a net decrease of just 9 worldwide. But the ranks of men in the priesthood swelled in the missionarie territories, and in both Africa and Asia the ratio of priests to laymen improved markedly.

The number of permanent deacons rose slightly, to 29,501-- of whom 19,440 are in America.

The number of women religious dropped significantly, by 9,385. The number of nuns in Europe and America (in practice, North America) sank by more than 15,000; increases in Asia (3,954) and Africa (1,285) were not enough to overcome that attrition.

There were 143,745 lay evangelists active in 2002, the vast majority of them (134,646) working in America.

The report from the Congregation for Evangelization showed a total of nearly 200,000 schools operating under Church auspices and serving more than 52 million students. The Church also runs more than 5,000 hospitals; 16,000 clinics, 14,000 homes for the aged and disabled, 8,000 orphanages, 11,000 nurseries, and 25,000 other social agencies.