ROME — A comprehensive statistical report on Catholicism this week reveals growth where the Church is vibrantly orthodox and decline where it has fallen into worldly liberalism.
For the latest year for which reliable data is available (2021), the Catholic population grew worldwide by 16,240,000 members compared to the prior year, registering an increase in every continent except Europe, where Church membership fell by 244,000.
Growth was largest in Africa, which saw an increase of 8,312,000 members. Unsurprisingly, the report also noted that weekly Mass attendance by country was highest in Nigeria (94 percent) followed by Kenya (73 percent).
Ten out of the 17 countries with the lowest weekly Mass attendance are in Europe, led by the Netherlands, with only seven percent attendance.
Currently, Catholics make up 17.67 percent of the world’s population, the report found.
In a separate analysis, Catholic League president Bill Donohue noted this week that “the most left-leaning clergy in the world are the Germans; the Africans are the most orthodox.”
Many members of the German clergy “want to Protestantize the Catholic Church,” Dr. Donohue observed. “But that hasn’t worked out too well — few Lutherans attend church services.”
The Catholic Church is declining in Europe because it is “mimicking” rather than challenging society, Donohue added. “Orthodoxy sells; heterodoxy fails.”
As Breitbart News has documented, the German Catholic Church has been hemorrhaging members for years but to counter the exodus, the clergy have merely exacerbated the problem by pandering to progressive interests rather than restoring traditional Church teaching.
The Catholic Church in Germany has exploited Pope Francis’ call to undertake a listening process called the “Synodal Way,” using the pretext of dialogue to propose radical changes to established Church teaching, wrote Catholic intellectual George Weigel in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this year.
For instance, the German Synodal Way decided “to rewrite the Catholic Church’s sexual ethic and sacramental practice by authorizing the formal, liturgical blessing of same-sex unions and calling for women to be admitted to holy orders,” Weigel wrote.
What is unfolding in Germany is akin to “the 16th-century Lutheran Reformation: apostasy,” Weigel wrote, which has led some in Rome to refer to the Synodal Way as the “Suicidal Way.”
