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Journalism of Courage
The College of Cardinals that will meet to elect a new head of the Catholic Church may well choose someone from outside Europe — a reflection of the shifting global base of Catholicism (and Christianity, in general) from Europe to the Global South.
In 2013, the Argentinian Francis, then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires, became the first Pope from South America.
From Europe to Africa
According to the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2023, released by the Vatican’s Central Office of Church Statistics in March, the world’s Catholic population crossed 1.4 billion in 2023.
More than 72% of the world’s Catholics lived in South and Central America (41.2%), Africa (20%), and Asia (11%) put together. Europe was home to 20.4% of the Catholic population, and North America 6.6%, according to a report by Vatican News, the official news portal of the Holy See.
The situation was very different in the early 20th century. In 1910, Europe was home to 65% of Catholics, and Latin America roughly 24%, according to data published by Pew Research Center in 2013.
If current trends hold, Europe’s share in the global Catholic population will decline further in the coming decades. In 2022-23, Africa’s Catholic population increased by 3.3%, while that of the Americas, Asia, and Europe grew by only 0.9%, 0.6%, and 0.2% respectively, according to Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2023 data reported by Vatican News.
This tracks the Pew projection of the shift in the global distribution of the Christian population, including non-Catholic denominations. In a 2022 report, Pew projected that by 2050, Sub-Saharan Africa alone will have two-and-a-half times the number of Christians in all of Europe. As recently as 2010, Europe was home to more Christians than sub-Saharan Africa.
Part of larger picture
One obvious reason behind the shift in the global distribution of Catholics is the diverging rates of overall population growth in the Global North and South.
According to data compiled by the economic historian Ewout Frankema of the University of Groningen, the Global South’s share in the world’s population went from 64% in 1900 to 80% in 2000, and is projected to reach 88% in 2100. (‘From the Great Divergence to South–South Divergence: New comparative horizons in global economic history’, Journal of Economic Surveys, 2024).
Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, has projected that Europe’s population will likely peak at 453.3 million in 2026 before declining by as much as 6% by the end of the century. By contrast, the population of the Global South is expected to grow until at least the second half of this century.
Africa, specifically sub-Saharan Africa, currently has the highest rate of population growth in the world. According to the UN’s ‘World Population Prospects 2024’, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to roughly a third of the global population in 2100; it had less than a fifth in 2020.
In other words, the region in which the Catholic population is growing the fastest is also seeing the fastest population growth overall.
But differential growth rates tell only a part of the story.
Between 1910 and 2010, Europe’s population went from 44% Catholic to 35% Catholic, according to the 2013 Pew analysis. This tracks the larger decline of Christianity (and religion, overall) in Europe.
In his influential The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe 1750–2000 (2003), religious historian Hugh Mcleod proposed the following four stages to explain this decline.
* Toleration of alternative forms of Christianity in the Reformation and post-Reformation era, from the 16th century onward;
* Publication of literature that was critical of Christianity during the Enlightenment era in the 18th century;
* Separation of church and state, from the 18th century onward; and
* The eventual “gradual loosening of the ties between church and society” in the 20th century.
There has been a gradual trend “towards a society whose institutions and laws reflect a pluralism in which a wide variety of religious groups, as well as other people with a more secular orientation, each have their place… The state [has taken] over functions formerly performed by the church, and trained professionals [have taken] over roles that once belonged to priests, nuns, or others impelled by a sense of religious vocation”.
The decline in the share of Christians in Europe’s population comes as the share of the “unaffiliated” (to any religion) continues to increase.
This trend is particularly strong in certain historically Catholic countries.
For instance, France has gone from being 98.4% Catholic in 1910 to only 60.4% Catholic in 2010, according Pew data. This trend has continued since then.
French government data from 2021 reported only 47% of the population to be Catholic, compared to 33% affiliated to no religion. A survey carried out by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies, Paris in 2019-20 found that 53% of respondents between ages 18 and 49 in metropolitan France reported having no religion, compared to 25% who said they were Catholic.
No trends comparable to this are seen in the developing world. In fact, sub-Saharan Africa went from being less than 1% Catholic in 1910 to 21% Catholic in 2010.
This has been due to both the Church’s willingness to be inclusive and syncretise local African traditions, and to act as one of the biggest providers of welfare in one of the poorest regions in the world. “More than any other religious community or faith, Catholicism has been the largest non-state provider of healthcare and education in Africa,” Father Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, a Jesuit priest from Nigeria, told The Newsweek in 2015.
Impact of Church scandal
One factor specific to the decline of Catholicism in the West has been a slew of sexual abuse cases involving the clergy that have come to light in recent years.
Numerous studies and polls have shown that Catholics’ faith in the Church and clergy takes a hit every time a new case is revealed.
In 2017, Gallup found 49% of Catholics in the US had a “high” or “very high” opinion of the honesty and ethical standards of the clergy. In December 2018, at the end of what CNN described as the Church’s “year from hell” in which a number of sex abuse cases came to light, that number had crashed to 31%.
This also translates to larger disaffection with the Church and religion itself. In June 2017, 52% of American Catholics professed a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the Church or organised religion, according to Gallup. A year later, that number had fallen to 44%.
While such cases have also taken place in the Global South, “much of the developing world has largely escaped a public explosion of the scandal, as have conflict zones and countries where Catholics are a minority”, the Associated Press reported in 2019.
