Priest shortage? Decline in membership? Problems with Church teaching?
Usually these are questions brought up in the West, but not so in the rest of the world. In fact, Catholicism is booming worldwide, and the problems experienced in the West tend to be cultural rather than systematic:
While there’s perfectly legitimate debate to be had on each of these questions, the underlying assumption of decline reveals a particularly Western focus. The reality is that worldwide, these are boom times for Catholicism, not bust.
The numbers are indisputable.
In 1900, at the dawn of the 20th century, there were 459 million Catholics in the world, of whom 392 million were found in Europe and North America, and just 67 million scattered across the rest of the planet, principally in Latin America.
In 2000, there were 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, with 380 million in Europe and North America, and almost 800 million in the global South. Roughly half of the Catholics in the world today live in Latin America alone. Given demographic and religious trends, this population realignment in global Christianity will continue. By 2025, only one Catholic in five in the world will be a non-Hispanic Caucasian.
It is the Catholic Church, after all.
I find these numbers interesting not only for the fact that the Church is growing worldwide, but for the fact the Church struggles only in the hypersecular West. While these problems are indeed real and very serious, they are entirely our own.
Ask an African or Latin American bishop about a seminarian problem. In the West, we speak of recruitment. There, they can’t build the seminaries fast enough! I wonder whether by 2025 if the United States will be receiving missionary priests and nuns?