Yes, let’s challenge this myth.
For quite some time now, there has been
a deranged thinking among the media, the secularists and even among the general
public that the Catholic Church is in decline. This touched its peak speculations
during those days ensuing Pope Benedict’s resignation and the conclave that
followed it, that the successor of Benedict XVI will preside over a continually
shrinking membership. This assumption is the justification for questions about
celibacy, homosexuality, contraception, and the perennial challenge to the
Church to ‘modernize’ or die.
Pointing out the short-sighted and
locally-focused assumptions of those who assert Catholic decline as a given, David
Brooks, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 2003, wrote that “a great
Niagara of religious fervor is cascading down around them, while they stand
obtuse and dry in the little cave of their own parochialism.”
‘Parochialism’ is exactly the right
word. The Church in Western Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United
States is not representative. Viewed globally the Church experienced a
spectacular growth over the twentieth century which shows little sign of
slowing.
Strong,
sometimes spectacular growth:
In 1900 there were roughly 266 million
Catholics in the world. This rose to 1,045 million by 2000. By 2010 there were 1,197
million, according to the 2012 edition of the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae, the ‘Statistical Yearbook
of the Church’. Over the last forty years, Catholics have consistently made up
between 17% and 18% of the world’s population; having been steadily about 17.3%
in recent years, they now are probably about 17.5%.
Critics of the Church habitually dismiss
evidence for global growth by saying such growth is “only in the south”. Aside
from the racist undertones to such comments, which seem to imply that it’s only
‘the West’ that matters, they ignore the crucial fact that global growth in
general over the twentieth century was highest in Africa, Asia, and Latin
America. To say that the Church is only growing in ‘the South’ is to say only
that the Church is growing where the population is growing.
LATIN AMERICA:
Latin America could fairly be described
as the heartland of modern Catholicism, with more than 40% of the world’s
Catholic population coming from that continent — and that figure is even higher
if we include the Latino populations of the US and Canada.
Even though the proportion of professing
Catholics to the general population has dropped in recent decades, absolute
growth has continued across the continent. Over the course of the twentieth
century, the population of Latin America and the Caribbean rose from about 60
million to 561 million, while the number of Catholics there rose from 53
million to about 449 million.
Pentecostalism has made strong inroads,
partly a consequence of the low numbers of priests to population (one priest
per 8,000 Catholics). But seminary enrolment is on the rise, according to John
Allen’s Future Church, increasing 440% between 1984 and 2009. (The
number of seminarians in Bolivia, for example, rose from 49 to 714 between 1972
and 2001, while the number in Honduras rose from 40 to 170 between 1989 and
2007.)
AFRICA:
Catholicism has grown more dramatically
in Africa than anywhere else in the world over the last century. In 1900, there
were fewer than two million Catholics in sub-Saharan Africa, whereas by 2000,
there were more than 130 million; this, as John Allen points out in The
Future Church, represents a staggering growth rate of more than 6,000 per
cent. Current estimates reckon that there are about 160 million Catholics in
Africa, though even these estimates may be too low; the Church in Africa
lacks the institutional framework to track growth accurately, and if the Gallup
World Poll can be trusted, there may already be almost 200 million Africans
claiming to be Catholic. Either way, growth in Africa’s Catholic population is
far higher than among the general population.
This spectacular growth is a truly
indigenous phenomenon. The number of Western missionaries active in Africa has
been declining since the mid-1960s, while the African Church has produced vast
numbers of priests. Interviewed by John Allen in 2005, the then Archbishop on
Nairobi said that among his biggest problems was an excess of vocations, such
that “seminaries built for one hundred now have almost two hundred.” In
Nigeria, where there are about 20 million Catholics, one seminary alone has
more than a thousand students. This may be the biggest seminary in the world,
but even then the Nigerian Church is overstretched, as, in Allen’s words,
“Africans are being baptized even more rapidly than they’re being ordained.”
As one would expect in this situation,
local control has increasingly become the norm. Under a quarter of Tanzania’s
bishops were native Africans in 1965, for instance, whereas by 1996 local men
headed every diocese; there are currently 18 African cardinals, 11 of whom have
participated in the recent papal conclave.
ASIA:
If
Africa ended 2010 with 765 more clergy than in 2009, Asia did even better; the
latest edition of Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae records that Asia was the
continent which saw the most growth in priest and deacon numbers during that
period, resulting in 1,695 more clergy in Asia in 2010 than in 2009.
In Asia overall, the proportion of Catholics more than doubled over the course
of the twentieth century (just 1.2% of Asians were Catholic in 1900, but 3.0%
of Asians were in 2000). This growth has taken place not only in traditional
Catholic countries such as the Philippines — the third largest Catholic country
in the world, where there were more Catholic baptisms in 2000 than in France,
Spain, Italy, and Poland combined — but in mission countries such as South
Korea, where the number of Catholics doubled to more than five million people
between 1985 and 2005; as well as India, whose Catholic population rose from
two million to more than 17 million over the course of the twentieth
century.
The Chinese government says there are
about six million Catholics in China, out of 25 million Christians of all
denominations — a massive growth from the million or so Christians there in
1970. There is far more to the story than this, as most Chinese Christians –
Catholic or otherwise – are not registered as such with the state, and worship
clandestinely. The World Christian Database estimates that there are
more than 120 million Christians in China; Philip Jenkins, author of
1999’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, thinks
it more likely that there are about 65 million at present. Either way, it seems
unlikely that there are fewer than 15 million Catholics in China, and there may
be – and will be – far more.
CLERGY NUMBERS:
It’s clear that the popular narrative of
Catholic decline isn’t supported by the facts: the global story of modern
Catholicism is one of growth. In so far as there’s any truth to it at all, that
truth is increasingly out of date.
It is undeniable, for instance, that the
number of priests worldwide declined dramatically in the 1970s: there were
almost 420,000 priests in 1970, which had dropped to 403,000 by 1985. Since
1985, however, the number of priests has grown, slowly reaching 406,000 in
2005, and then leaping to more than 412,000 in 2010. If there’s a real
vocations story in the Church, it’s not a story of decline, but of recovery.
Worldwide, the annual number of new
diocesan priestly ordinations increased spectacularly under Pope John Paul II:
1975 saw just 4,150 men being ordained to the diocesan priesthood, but
ordinations have been consistently in the region of 6,500 a year since the
mid-nineties, with the number of graduate-level seminarians having steadily
risen between 1985 to 2005 from more than 43,000 to about 58,500.
Western
Europe & the US: crisis & recovery
It has been a very different story in
Western Europe and North America, home to most of the media — which is why the
western experience has shaped the standard media narrative of Catholic decline.
Between 1975 and 2005, the annual number
of priestly ordinations in the United States dropped from 771 to 454, while the
number of graduate-level seminarians dropped from 8,325 in 1965 to 3,172 in
1995. This sharp drop, especially in the 1970s-80s, corresponds to the period
of most clerical sex abuse of minors, sexual laxity in seminaries, and the
departure of very large numbers of priests to marry. Most church historians and
commentators would regard this period as a time of crisis, both institutionally
and of faith. (The claims about Cardinal O’Brien’s behaviour, for example, date
from this period.)
Since then, however, things have stabilized
and begun to turn. In the U.S. there were 442 ordinations in 2000, 454 in 2005,
and 480 in 2010; over the same period, the number of graduate-level seminarians
has risen to 3,723. Pope Benedict’s papacy saw a surge of applications to
American seminaries, such that the dioceses aren’t afraid to turn unsuitable
applicants away.
A
similar story can be seen in the UK:
A general decline in ordinations to the
diocesan priesthood set in began during the 1980s (although it was offset and
even disguised to some degree by an influx of formerly Anglican clergy in the
1990s). Numbers collapsed from 84 in 1999 to 33 in 2000, continuing to drop
until 2008, when only 15 men were ordained to the diocesan priesthood.
Yet even this low figure needs to be put
in context: it was significantly higher than the rate of ordinations in the
1930s and comparable to the rate in the 1940s. Since 2008, in any case, numbers
have steadily risen: about 30 diocesan priests were ordained last year, and
almost 40 are expected to be ordained this year. The UK — especially dioceses
such as Westminster and Southwark — boast priest:people ratios that would be
the envy of the vibrant Catholic communities of Africa and South America.
Likewise, seminary entry figures show
that a mere 22 men entered seminary in 2001, but 40 or so did so during each
year of Benedict’s papacy, 49 doing so in 2011. This growth has continued, with
the number of seminarians in the archdiocese of Southwark alone rising from 11
in 2011 to 26 in 2012. Seminarians are not only increasing in number, but are
getting younger, reversing a trend in previous decades.
These figures understate the
reality in other ways too. They do not include, for example, the 84 priests and
seminarians who are members of the newly-formed Ordinariate of Our Lady of
Walsingham; nor do they include members of religious orders, amongst which
there are also clear signs of growth: only 13 men entered formation in
religious congregations in 2004, but twice as many did so in 2009.
Although ordinations in England and
Wales are on the rise as a result of the so-called ‘Benedict Bounce’
that followed the 2010 papal visit, it cannot honestly be said that the Church
here is in rude health. Neither, however, should we exaggerate the Church’s
problems. Baptisms of children under the age of seven may have dropped by 0.1pc
from 2009 to 2010, but over the same period the number of adults entering into
full communion in the Church rose by 10.7%.
Even with Mass attendance having
declined over the past two decades, it seems that somewhere in the region of a
million Catholics attend Mass in Britain every week, more than any other
religious congregation. Given that Catholicism in the UK has evolved from a
faith shaped by convention — not least through association with the Irish
diaspora — to a faith of conviction, this is a significant figure. People are
at Mass out of choice.
Indeed, it looks as though the decline
bottomed out in 2005, and may have started to reverse – 915,556 attended Mass
on a weekly basis in 2007, with 918,844 doing so in 2008. To put this into
context, roughly 700,000 people attend a Premier League, Championship, or
League football match every week.
As
Benita Hewitt put it in the ‘Guardian’:
“It’s time to believe that the
church in this country [UK] is no longer in decline. The latest statistics
coming from various denominations are clearly showing stability in church
attendance and even signs of growth. This news may come as a surprise to many
people who believe that the church is a dying institution.”
Of course what matters are not numbers
but the strength and authenticity of faith — the quality, not the quantity.
Where numbers are low or declining, there may be evidence of a Church that is smaller,
but purer, emerging. And where numbers are high, and the institution strong,
trouble may be brewing, for success can disguise a lack of fidelity.
But one thing is clear. The Catholic
Church is not in crisis, and it is not declining. As Pope Benedict said, ‘the
barque is not mine, it’s not ours, it is Christ’s. He will not let it sink…’ He
wants it to continue to be ‘the light to the world’ and witness to His Truth in
this world.
Troubles may arise just as He himself
was hated for no reason whatsoever, but His affirmation, ‘I am with you till
the end of the ages’ is promising. He attracts to Himself people of every
generation. Take any century or generation, He was the top most agenda of
discussion. The point is simple – Truth is attractive, Beauty is attractive and
Goodness is attractive. Christ is the Truth, the Beauty and the Goodness.
In the book of Edward Gibbons ‘Decline and Fall of Roman Empire’, we
learn that the Roman Empire is not dead, it continues to conquer… only the name
changed and it is ‘Roman Catholic Church’.
Finally, let’s remember the words of
Pope Francis, “it is impossible to find Jesus Christ outside His Church – One,
Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church’. No wonder why the media and the
secularists are now beginning to exclaim, “oh! He [Pope Francis] is also a
Catholic”.
Thank you,
Papireddy
[May 4th 2013]
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