UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
John L. Allen Jr. | May. 17, 2013 All Things Catholic
To no one’s surprise, the Monday release of the Vatican’s 2013 statistical yearbook, which surveys the global Catholic population as of 2011, confirmed the shift in Catholicism’s center of gravity away from Europe and North America to the southern hemisphere.
The Annuario shows that the global Catholic population, now 1.2 billion, kept pace with overall growth in 2011, but with major regional disparities. Catholicism in Africa increased by 4.3 percent and in Asia by 2 percent, both twice the general rate, but in Europe only 0.3 percent. The trend applies to Christianity generally. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, the demographic heart of the faith is now in Timbuktu, Mali, and by 2100, it will have shifted even further south to Sokoto, Nigeria.
On the lecture circuit, Catholics in North America and Europe curious about how this will play out often ask two very intriguing questions:
Will the rise of the “global south” mean a shift away from issues that loom large in the West, especially the “culture wars” — contraception, gay rights, abortion and so on?
Will it mean a less political church, as Catholicism is increasingly shaped by cultures without the European legacy of church/state entanglement?
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