The continent is bucking the trend on priestly vocations
The number of seminarians has fallen amid what a Vatican document calls a “crisis of vocations”. But Africa – and one nation in particular – has bucked the trend.
Between 2012 and 2016, the number of men in seminary training for the priesthood fell by nearly 4,000, to 116,160.
The decline has been especially concentrated in the Americas and Europe. But in Africa seminary numbers have steadily increased. Uganda, Cameroon and Tanzania all show healthy increases; the most striking rise, of 66 per cent, is in Madagascar.
The figures come in the Vatican’s official statistical record, the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae, whose headline figures were published last week.
Seminary numbers, the Vatican report says, reached “a maximum in 2012 followed by a slow decrease”. This pattern was seen in several places including North America and Mexico.
The figures come in the Vatican’s official statistical record, the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae, whose headline figures were published on Wednesday.
The Annuarium shows that the world’s proportion of baptised Catholics stayed around the same from 2010-16: it was an estimated 1.299 billion in 2016, more than a sixth of the world’s population.
Africa has the fastest-growing Catholic population: it rose from 185 million in 2010 to 228 million in 2016. Europe saw a rise of just 0.2 per cent over the same period – but because the continent’s
population growth is itself stagnating, this represented a slight rise in the overall proportion.
In 2016 there were 414,969 priests: more than two thirds were diocesan clergy, the rest in religious orders. The overall priestly population fell by 0.2 per cent from 2014-16, thanks to a numerical decline in Europe, North America and the Middle East.
For vocations directors wondering how to help young men hear God’s call, a trip to Madagascar might be worth the air fare.
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