VATICAN CITY (ReligionNewsService) — Africa is the Catholic Church's region of biggest growth, with rising numbers of faithful, clergy and religious orders, according to Vatican statistics. 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 the May 18 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.
Though the world's proportion of baptized Catholics remained roughly the same over the seven-year period, amounting to 17.3% of the world's 1.1 billion people in 2006, its geographical distribution shifted markedly....