Not All Catholics Are Impressed by the Pope

[leo]

According to one of my sources, Catholic membership has been more or less steady worldwide.  17% of the world pop in 1910, 16% of the world pop in 2010.  Not exactly dying, at least not for the time being, though it's not making any net gains.

You're correct, it has grown in Africa and Asia (and surprisingly, also in North America), which has offset its losses in Europe and Latin America.  Given how subsaharan africa is neither particularly influential nor affluent, one can only wonder at the wisdom of such a move.  Though I suppose a weak predator always prefers the easiest prey.

The Vatican counts the Roman Catholic membership as the Baptized members and not as active members. In Latin America many  Roman Catholics( baptized people ) are converting to protestantism and others are also indiferent to religion . So the practicing Catholic membership is shrinking. The vocations of priests and nuns are dropping at epic proportions. The Catholic church is very aware of this problem and they reported their problems in latin America. In United States  the practicing membership is shrinking too. In Europe the Catholic church is pretty much a death religion. The baptized membership is about 1.2 billion but the active members are probably about half ,  maybe 500- 600 million tops. So Yep the Catholic church (with the exception of Asia and Africa) is slowly dying. If the Vatican don't do something about it , the Catholic Church will probably be a extinct religion in a century . Christianity will probably survive in the protestant form ( protestantism is growing worldwide) and the orthodox christianity form( orthodoxy is actually growing in some parts of the world).

[hrdlr110]

I wonder if this means they are going to elect a bigger shit-fuck of a pope the next time around because of this....

Cardinal George pell recently left Sydney for a position at the Vatican. He'd be a great choice if shit-fuck of a pope is the direction they wanted to go!