One out of every nine Catholics today lives in Asia

Updated data from the Church's Statistical Yearbook published by the Vatican. Asian Catholics grew by 0.99% in the last year. More than 175,000 Asian nuns, now close to 30 percent of the total in the world. The decline in seminarians continues

Vatican City (AsiaNews) - The Holy See this week published in the Annuario Pontificio 2023 and the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2021, which contain the most up-to-date data on all the numbers concerning the Catholic Church in the world. the editing of which was taken care of by the Central Office for Church Statistics, are in these days being distributed in bookstores, published by the Libreria editrice vaticana. On this mine of numbers L'Osservatore Romano published a long article summarizing the most important trends and within which there is also some significant news about the Churches of Asia.

At the planetary level, the number of baptized Catholics increased from 1,360 million in 2020 to 1,378 million in 2021, a growth of 1.3 percent. This increase is slightly less than that of the Earth's population, which has risen over the same period from 7,667 to 7,786 million, a change of 1.6 percent.

Against this backdrop, Asia remains one of the areas of the world where the number of baptized people exceeds the number of Catholics who die: in the last twelve months the increase in the total number was 0.99 percent.

In comparison to the continent's inhabitants, Asian Catholics still account for about 3.3 percent of the population (compared to the figure of 17.67 percent baptized globally).

However, it is interesting to remember that - Asia being the continent where most of the world's population lives - in the overall look at the universal Church, Asian Catholics represent 11 percent of the baptized.

So while they are a very small flock in many of their own countries, in the overall picture of global Catholicism their numbers - along with those of African Catholics - are becoming increasingly significant, in the face of the ongoing decline in Europe and North America.

A particularly significant example comes, for example, from data on women religious: in 2021 there were 608,958 nuns in the world, but of these as many as 175,494 lived in Asia (28.9 percent).

And while in the breakdown by continents Europe still leads with 33 percent, the current trend clearly says that probably very soon in women's religious life Asia will become the continent with the largest number of nuns.

Finally, as for the number of priests Asia during the two-year period under consideration still showed an overall growth of 1%. And it remains a continent with many priests relative to the number of the faithful: 2,137 for every baptized (compared to a global average of 3,373).

But even in Asia there is a clear reversal of the trend now underway: the effects of the demographic winter in many countries are beginning to be felt, and so even the number of Asian seminarians in the past year has decreased by 1.6 percent.

Thus in the world, the only continent still showing a slight increase in vocations to the priesthood remains Africa where a +0.6 percent in the number of seminarians was found.

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