The Global Future of the Catholic Church

In recent months, there have been several articles in both Catholic and secular press noting an uptick in interest in the Catholic Church among young adults in the United States. While encouraging, some of the reporting was based on anecdotal observations: particular churches with active young adult ministries; social media presence of Catholic “influencers” with a growing audience; Catholic activities on university campuses drawing large numbers; even prominent political figures or media personalities affirming their Catholic identity.

The more encouraging news is about those entering the Church: more adult converts. In some dioceses there is an increase of 50% or more over previous years. The trend is clearly and at times dramatically on the upswing.

There are similar reports out of France and Italy where secularism has devastated once vibrant Catholic cultures. Pockets of a dynamic, growing faith exist even in the most secularized cultures. Although they are isolated and relatively small, something is different.

These are hopeful signs, but still the exception. According to most empirical data, faith in Western countries remains on the decline. The numbers available for infant baptisms, confirmations, and marriages provide a more sober assessment of the trajectory of the faith in the United States and Europe, as well as Mexico and South America.

It is important to look at this data in light of the Church’s mission of evangelization. What is working and what isn’t are pressing questions facing the Church in the West. While it is impossible to know exactly what the future holds for the faith in various parts of the world, the global trends provide important information that can guide efforts to re-evangelize once Christian cultures.

The downward turn of Europe

Historically, Europe has been the center of the Roman Catholic Church organizationally and demographically. Christendom has largely been an Eurocentric reality. Pope Francis, as one simple example, was the first pope in more than a thousand years to not come from Europe. We can also point to the great cathedrals, universities, religious communities, sacred art and music, and so much more that find their birthplace in Europe.

The days of an observable Christendom, however, are over. When Christendom died is up for debate, but the fact that Christendom is dead is undeniable. The 20th century saw its peak of ordinations in the 1980s, likely well past the spiritual peak of European Catholic culture. As one indicator, Europe was producing over 2,500 priests per year in the 1980s—over twice as many as any other continent. However, since then, ordinations have plummeted to around 1,000 per year today.*

By 2018, Africa surpassed Europe as the largest source of priests, and just recently, Europe was also passed by Asia. Of course, Africa and Asia have far greater populations than Europe and so should produce more priests, but that merely highlights how Eurocentric Catholicism has been.

A look at Europe reveals that the strongest center of the Church was Poland. While it has declined to around 200 priests per year, in its heyday in 1988, it produced over 800 per year (this analysis of the time-trend starts in 1978, the year of Pope John Paul II’s election, so there may have been a significant John Paul II effect in Poland inspiring young men to join the priesthood). In a far second was Italy (ranging from 300 to 500 per year).

It is worth noting which countries are not on the list as providing the ballast for Europe. Germany, financially significant for the worldwide Church and with a very large Catholic population of 19 million, only produced 34 priests in 2023. It’s also worth noting that in the previous five years, they ordained 62 priests, and five years before that, 98. So, it’s unclear if 34 is the floor or if it will continue the downward trajectory to almost nothing.

Belgium, on the other hand, may have hit that floor, barely cracking into the double digits at 10 ordinations and 8.4 million Catholics in 2023. While five years prior they ordained eight men, with the same number as five years before that, and five years before that.

There are Catholics on paper, but not much indication that the Church has a hopeful future in Germany or Belgium. Both countries have ten times more priestly deaths than ordinations per year. (Belgium at 110 vs 10 and Germany at 345 vs 34 in 2023). Baptisms have also tanked. Shortly after reunification in 1993, there were over a quarter million Germans being baptized every year (283,000); as of 2023, it was about half that (142,000). The trend for general Catholic vitality in Europe is quickly reaching a floor.

The tale of two Americas

South America peaked later (2008) and is doing better, but still isn’t doing great. It’s “ordinations per million Catholics” measure is lower than any other continent at around 2.5–3, depending on the year. Consequently, it doesn’t produce as many priests as one might expect, considering how Catholic all South American countries have been traditionally. Specifically, it ordains about 800 men per year—about the same number as North and Central America combined. Brazil, for example, doesn’t ordain that many more priests (424 in 2023) than the United States (342 in 2023), even though its Catholic population is around 115 million versus around 75 million in the United States. As a percentage of its Catholic population, America is ordaining more men.

Still, Brazil provides a high number of baptisms at about 3 million per year (only recently superseded by Africa) and has the highest proportion of births that are baptized Catholic. So South America has its strengths as a traditionally Catholic space that is at least nominally Catholic, but also its weaknesses in terms of devotedness. Additionally, its plummeting fertility and now European-level family sizes militate against it being a major source of Catholic growth in the future. In just one or two generations, it is very possible that much of South America will lose even a cultural Catholicity.

The United States is the inverse of South America. The number of priests in the United States declined rapidly from its peak of 600 ordinations per year in the late 1970s to around 400 per year in 1998. It has plateaued there and has not seen the significant drop-off that many other parts of the world have. While there is still a priest shortage, it could certainly be worse.

Baptisms are another story. For three decades, from 1978 to 2008, baptisms hovered at around one million per year. But since 2008, baptisms have nearly halved and now stand at about 590,000. However, those who remain sacramentally engaged with the Church tend to be more than cultural Catholics—a phenomenon less evident in South America, where the gap between Catholic self-identification and actual sacramental practice has historically been far wider. American Catholicism has a core of true, devout believers, but like every developed country, it has suffered under the expansion of secularism.

Africa: The future of the Church

By any measure, Africa is the future of the Church. In large part, this is because it is the future of the world, with every population projection showing Africa exploding relative to the rest of the world because it is one of the few places still producing enough children to replace itself from one generation to the next. We see the implications of this demography in the number of Catholic baptisms, which have doubled from 1973 at around two million per year to four million per year in 2023.

However, the baptisms per capita measure has actually been fairly stable across the past few decades, suggesting that this explosive growth is simply a consequence of its natural population growth and not of evangelization. Still, it has the highest baptisms and priestly ordinations of any continent, and the second-highest priest ordinations per million Catholics (around 6.3 per year per million Catholics, second only to Asia at 7.5 per million Catholics). It is now a significant exporter of priests throughout the world.

All of this suggests that while the African Church is not making a lot of inroads from evangelization, the Catholics there are devout and having large families that are successfully transmitting the faith to the next generation, with many of the men discerning into the priesthood or religious life. This core of faithful Catholics, combined with the forthcoming African population explosion, will make Africa the demographic epicenter of the future Catholic faith while other traditional cores of strength like Germany fade.

Pope Leo’s response

All of this is certainly on the mind of Pope Leo XIV, who has the responsibility to lead the global Catholic Church of an estimated 1.4 billion Catholics. As a son of the West with deep roots in the United States, South America, and Italy, he is aware of the Church’s situation in the secularized West, perhaps as much or more than any pope in history. What he will do about the crisis remains to be seen, but he is unafraid to talk about the Faith and the power of Christ to transform individuals, communities, and societies.

For the next official gathering of the College of Cardinals in June (a consistory), the focus, as directed by Pope Leo, will be on Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. This is no doubt a clue about Leo’s vision. The exhortation came early in Francis’ pontificate before it became burdened by the weight of what some have argued was a failed pontificate. The document is evangelical to its core and was a stable bridge between the pontificates of Francis and Benedict XVI.

In his letter to the College of Cardinals earlier this month, looking ahead to the June consistory where the Cardinals will discuss the exhortation, Leo noted:

[Evangelii Gaudium] refocuses everything on the kerygma as the heart of our Christian and ecclesial identity. It was recognized as a “breath of fresh air,” capable of initiating processes of pastoral and missionary conversion — rather than producing immediate structural reforms — and thus profoundly guiding the Church’s journey…. [I]t calls every baptized person to renew their encounter with Christ, moving from a faith merely received to a faith truly lived and experienced. This journey affects the very quality of spiritual life, expressed in the primacy of prayer, in the witness that precedes words, and in the coherence between faith and life. At the community level, it calls for a shift from a pastoral approach of maintenance to one of mission…. From all of this flows a profoundly unified understanding of mission, which is Christ-centered and kerygmatic. It is born of an encounter with Christ that is capable of transforming lives and spreading through attraction rather than conquest…. Even when the Church finds herself in a minority, she is called to live with confident courage, as a small flock bringing hope to all, mindful that the aim of mission is not its own survival, but the communication of the love with which God loves the world.

If this is the Holy Father’s response to the crisis—and he seems to be telling us it is—then he envisions authentic witness to the transforming power of an encounter with Christ as the future of the Church. Numbers tell us something meaningful, but not the whole story. This ecclesial mission will take form differently according to different local situations, but the goal is the same: an encounter with Christ.

The objective is not the preservation of institutions, or the defeat of secularism, or the increase in particular statistics, or the capture of social media space—all of which are good things; rather, we can infer from Leo’s letter that they all come downstream from an encounter with Christ.

What we need now is to take up Leo’s vision, which is also the traditional vision of the Church, and focus our energy on encountering the risen Christ and facilitating encounters for others. The numbers can be discouraging, but our faith is not about numbers; it is about a person who desires to be in a relationship with each of us. The numbers will take care of themselves if all of us in the Church deepen our relationships with Jesus and help others to do likewise.

*Statistics from this article come from analysis in the Vatican-produced Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae. Data was culled every five years from 1978 to 2023, the most recent volume released.

(Editor’s note: This essay was posted first on the “What We Need Now” site and is reposted here with kind permission.)