The Vatican published updated data from the Statistical Yearbook of the Church. In the last year, Asian Catholics grew by 0.99%. There are more than 175,000 Asian religious, almost 30% of the world total. The fall in the number of seminarians continues.
Vatican City () – The Holy See recently published the Pontifical Yearbook 2023 and the Annualium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2021, which contain the most up-to-date data on all the numbers related to the Catholic Church in the world. They were drawn up by the Church’s Central Statistics Office and edited by the Vatican Publishing Library, and are already being distributed in bookstores. About this mine of numbers, L’Osservatore Romano published a long article that summarizes the most important trends: it also includes some significant news about the Churches in Asia.
On a planetary level, the number of baptized Catholics went from 1,360 million in 2020 to 1,378 million in 2021, an increase of 1.3%. This increase is slightly less than that of the Earth’s population, which went from 7,667 million to 7,786 million in the same period, a variation of 1.6%. In this context, Asia continues to be one of the areas in the world where the number of baptized is higher than that of Catholics who die: in the last twelve months, the increase in the total number was 0.99%.
In relation to the population of the continent, Asian Catholics still represent about 3.3% of the population (compared to 17.67% of baptized in the world). However, it is interesting to remember that, since Asia is the continent where most of the world’s population lives, in the universal Church as a whole, Asian Catholics represent 11% of the baptized. Therefore, although in many of your countries they are a very small flock, in the general panorama of world Catholicism their number is increasingly significant, as well as that of African Catholics, in the face of the decline that is taking place in Europe and North America. .
A particularly representative example comes from the data on women religious, for example: in 2021 there were 608,958 women religious in the world, but no less than 175,494 of them lived in Asia (28.9%). And if in the distribution by continents Europe continues to lead with 33%, the current trend clearly indicates that it is likely that very soon, in terms of female religious life, Asia will become the continent with the largest number of nuns.
Lastly, in terms of the number of priests, Asia continues to register a global growth of 1% during the biennium in question. And it continues to be a continent with many priests compared to the number of faithful: 2,137 for each baptized (compared to a world average of 3,373). But even in Asia a clear reversal of the trend is taking place: the effects of the demographic winter are beginning to be felt in many countries, so that the number of Asian seminarians in the last year also decreased by 1.6%. Thus, in the world, the only continent that continues to register a slight increase in vocations to the priesthood is Africa, where the number of seminarians increased by 0.6%.
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