VATICAN CITY (RNS)—Africa is the Catholic Church's region of biggest growth, with rising numbers of faithful, clergy and religious orders, according to Vatican statistics.
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Christian Fulanis in Nigeria meet at a local home for a Sunday morning Bible study.
The church's growth in the Americas has largely stalled, meanwhile, and Europe's share of the world's largest church continues to decline.
The findings appeared in a recent issue of the official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in an article summarizing the new edition of the church's statistical yearbook, which features a survey of worldwide Catholicism in the period 2000-2006.
Although the world's proportion of baptized Catholics remained roughly the same over the seven-year period—1.1 billion Catholics, amounting to 17.3 percent of the world's population—its geographical distribution shifted markedly.
The most notable change was in Africa, whose share of the worldwide church rose from 12.4 percent to 14 percent. Even more dramatic was the increase in church personnel there.
While the world total of Catholic priests barely increased, and the number of female religious actually fell, the church in Africa reported nearly a quarter more priests and almost one-sixth more nuns after seven years.
The Western Hemisphere held steady with about half of the world's Catholics and 30 percent of its priests. Asia's share of the world's Catholic population also remained unchanged at 10 percent, yet the continent produced an increasing share of the world's priests and nuns.
The church continued to shrink in its traditional heartland, Europe, whose portion of the world's Catholics fell from 26.8 percent to 25 percent, and where the number of priests declined by nearly 6 percent.