In today's parlance, the church is often said to be at "an inflection point."

Such points certainly seem ubiquitous during the Francis papacy.

Change has been at the core since Pope Francis appeared post-election on the balcony of St Peter's Basilica having left behind most of the ornaments of the office.

His use of the synodal process seems designed to gather in all of the changes that are altering the landscape of the church and causing, at least in some circumstances, an exodus from usual Catholic practice.

From the global to the local, things are changing.

In the United States, this is no longer your mother's or grandmother's church, but one that is increasingly multicultural and non-European, with fewer ordained priests every year.

Those are trends that are beyond hierarchical control.

Changes in the institutional structure, brought on again by demographic forces beyond the control of any authority figures, are also inevitable: The numbers simply no longer exist to sustain the parochial structures of yesteryear.

Unclear is exactly what form those inevitable changes will take.

Ever larger congregations to accommodate decreasing numbers of priests?

More responsibility for permanent deacons, another layer of all-male ordained clergy? Greater roles for women, perhaps even as deacons? Maybe something entirely new?

Dramatic jolts to local communities such as closings or new authoritarian pastors, combined with the sustained effects of the sex abuse scandal and cover-up, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, all probably have contributed to the growth of the diaspora.

However, the exodus began long before those events; it parallels the diminishment of Catholic institutional life in the United States that has been underway for decades and, in some categories, for more than half a century.

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), affiliated with Georgetown University, has a page on its website of frequently sought statistics on major trends in the Catholic world.

It is largely a tale, in numbers, of ongoing and massive institutional change. It could be viewed, at least in part, as a story of insistent, decadeslong decline.

For instance, what once was referred to as a priest shortage, suggesting it was a temporary supply problem to be remedied by ramped-up recruiting and revved-up vocation offices, has become a permanent reality.

However the data show that the numbers just represent a return to what once was normal after an unusual period of vocational growth.

The year 1965 is the first on the CARA chart and the highest point shown for Catholic clergy in the United States, with 59,426 total priests, including diocesan and members of religious orders. In 2022, the number was 34,344.

The data, according to CARA, covers dioceses and eparchies in the United States and in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Continue reading

• Tom Roberts was NCR executive editor from October 2018 through April 2020 and NCR editor from 2000-2008. He is the author of "The Emerging Catholic Church: A Community's Search for Itself" and "Joan Chittister: Her Journey from Certainty to Faith".
• Part one of this series appeared in the previous edition.

The latest data on world population from the U.N. Population Division reveals a number of trends that seem to indicate otherwise.

The following is PRI's brief overview of some of the findings from the recently released 2015 Revision of the World Population Prospects.

According to the U.N. Population Division, world population is estimated to be 7.3 billion today. That number is expected to rise to 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100.

In the past two and a half decades, world population has increased by 2 billion people.

Yet despite the rapid rise in world population, the percentage of people living with hunger in developing countries has actually dropped from 24% to 14% over the same time period.

Welcoming another 4 billion to the human family does not appear to necessitate a demographic catastrophe.

In fact, the future appears to be quite bright for future generations, especially in poorer and less developed nations. Infant and childhood mortality are set to decline sharply worldwide.

By 2100, the rate of deaths among children under the age of five will fall as much as 82% in less developed nations and 80% in the world's least developed countries.

Future generations will also have significantly longer lifespans to look forward to.

World average life expectancy at birth in the early 1950's was 48 years for women and 45 for men. Today those numbers are 73 for women and 68 for men.

By 2100, life expectancy at birth will have risen to almost 85 for women and 82 for men worldwide and even higher in developed nations—92 years for women.

The challenges of the 21st century, rather than stemming from overpopulation, appear to arise from falling fertility rates and larger aging cohorts with comparatively fewer from younger cohorts to support them.

By 2100, potential dependents (adults over 65 and dependents under 20) in high and upper-middle income countries will constitute half of the total population, up from about 37% today. Continue reading

Sources

• Population Research Institute article written by Jonathan Abbamonte.
• Image: Human Populations

The other two are France and the Netherlands.

These are some of the predictions made by Washington-based think-tank, Pew Research Centre, in a recently published report.

The report predicted that by 2050

• In the Asia Pacific region, the proportion of freethinkers will decline from 21% in 2010 to 17%
• The proportion of Christians in New Zealand will decline from 57% to 44.7 %
• The proportion of unaffiliated in New Zealand will reach 45.1%, making this category the largest "religion," by a whisker.
• In North America the proportion of people unaffiliated with any religion will increase from 19% to 23%
• In Europe the proportion of unaffiliated will increase from 17% to almost 26%.

These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world's population in 2050, down from roughly 16% as of 2010.

This is largely attributable to the fact that religious "nones" are, on average, older and have fewer children than people who are affiliated with a religion.

Listen to Radio New Zealand's "The Panel" discussion, Decline of religion

Other predictions include:

• 40 million people are predicted to switch to Christianity, while 106 million are predicted to leave.
• The number of Muslims will grow from 1.6 billion in 2010, to 2.76 billion by 2050.
• The growth in those choosing Christianity will grow far slower, rising from 2.17 billion, to 2.76.
• The percentage of Christians remains at 31.4 %, while the percentage of Muslims rises from just 23.2% to 29.7%
• Atheists, agnostics and other people who do not affiliate with any religion - though increasing in countries such as the United States and France - will make up a declining share of the world's total population.
• The global Buddhist population will be about the same size it was in 2010, while the Hindu and Jewish populations will be larger than they are today.
• In Europe, Muslims will make up 10% of the overall population.
• India will retain a Hindu majority but also will have the largest Muslim population of any country in the world, surpassing Indonesia.
• In the United States, Christians will decline from more than three-quarters of the population in 2010 to two-thirds in 2050.
• Judaism will no longer be the largest non-Christian religion in the United States. Muslims will be more numerous in than people who identify as Jewish on the basis of religion.
• Four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa.
• The number of countries with a Christian majority is expected to decline from 159 to 151 by 2050.

Pew's researchers took six years to analyse information from about 2,500 data sources, including censuses, demographic surveys, general population surveys and other studies.

Source

• PewResearchCentre
• Pewresearch.org
• channelnewsasia
• Radio New Zealand
• Radio New Zealand
• Image: The Huffington Post

More than half the world's population—now lives in societies where the fertility rate has been dropping, like a stone in some places, for decades. Among demographers, the prevailing narrative for this sea change in human affairs talks of economic development finished off by cultural change. As countries grow wealthier and more urban, with higher levels of education for women, as well as men, women naturally wish to have fewer children; add in access to safe and effective means to that end—contraception and abortion—and that's precisely what they do.

True enough, but not the whole truth, argues Harvard demographer Michael Teitelbaum, co-author (with Yale historian Jay Winter) of The Global Spread of Fertility Decline. At the core of the change, Teitelbaum believes, lies the rational belief of young adults—especially the highly educated, those most aware of the weak points in their society's institutions—that they live in "risk societies." The risks they see can reach to the apocalyptic (will there be another Chernobyl, another 9/11, how many more Lac-Mégantics?) to macroeconomic pessimism (can today's social welfare entitlements last?) to individual concerns(will we ever be able to own a house?). Marriage- and child-aversion are among their risk-management strategies. Continue reading

Sources

• MacLean's
• Image: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand