Thursday, February 15, 2007

Number of Catholics...Steady, Number of Priest...Up

Boy, I've been swamped lately. Work has put a strangle hold on my blogging time. While my wife and I did celebrate Valentine's Day yesterday, we had to postpone our major celebration until this weekend.

Anyway I hope to increase my post or at least maintain some consistency.

This week I read an interesting article on the number of Catholics in the World as well as some stats on priest growth numbers.

According to the yearbook’s newly compiled stats for the years between 2004 and 2005, the number of Catholics increasing in the world from 1,098 million to 1,115 million, a growth of 1.5 percent. However, because this growth is very similar to that of the population of the planet (1.2 percent), the percentage of Catholics in the world remained substantially unchanged at 17.2 percent.

A geographical analysis of these variations shows that over the period 2004- 2005, the number of Catholics in Africa grew by 3.1 percent, while the population of the continent grew by 2.1 percent. In Asia and the Americas the number of Catholics also increased slightly with respect to the population (2.71 percent against 1.18 percent in Asia, 1.2 percent against 0.9 percent in the Americas). In Europe, the number of Catholics grew slightly while the population remained almost stationery.

Seems the biggest growth is in Africa with 3.1%. In the U.S. the growth was only .9%.

For priests the number seems to have grown slightly. Good news.

In 2004-2005, the number of religious and diocesan priests passed from 405,891 to 406,411 (a growth of 0.13 percent). However, the distribution of priests differed from continent to continent, with their numbers growing in Africa and Asia (respectively, by 3.8 percent and 3.55 percent) and falling in Europe and America (by 0.5 percent), and in Oceania (by 1.8 percent).

The number of candidates to the priesthood, both diocesan and religious, also increased overall, passing from 113,044 in 2004 to 114,439 in 2005 (an increase of 1.23 percent). However, vocations are most numerous in Africa and Asia, they are falling in Europe and are stationary in Oceania.

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