Catholic priest crisis: Europe, US importing from Africa, Asia
The traditional strongholds of world Catholicism – Europe and America – are struggling to find enough priests to lead their congregations and have turned instead to Africa and Asia.
The church is experiencing booming popularity on those continents while allegiance to the Vatican is fading in Europe, its traditional heartland.
That’s according to a survey by the Georgetown University-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), which said a boom in Asia and Africa is more than offsetting losses in the Americas and Europe.
But churches in the US and Europe are struggling to find priests, forcing them to look abroad for recruits, according to the Washington Examiner.
Where the church is growing so is the stable of priests, helping the church to plug gaps in the US.
The CARA report said: “A growing phenomenon within the Church is the use of African and Asian priests in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere where there are too few native priests to staff parishes.”
The overall Catholic population has grown 57 per cent between 1980 and 2012, according to CARA, topping 1.2billion for the first time.
Africa is experiencing the biggest growth, up 238 per cent to 198million, while the number of Catholics in Asia has grown 115 per cent to nearly 135million.
The Americas remain at the top with close to 599million Catholics and a 56 per cent growth from 1980-2012. In the same time Europe has experienced just six per cent growth.
In Europe fewer people are attending mass and parish populations are shrinking but the growth continents for Catholicism are running short of space and are seeing parish populations surge.
CARA said: “The Church is currently undergoing a dramatic realignment due largely to these differential growth patterns.
“The parishes that served the Church for hundreds and hundreds of years are no longer closely aligned with the world’s Catholic population and certainly not its most frequently Mass attending populations.
“However, there is no giant crane that can pick up a parish from Europe and relocate it to Africa.”
The priest population in the Americas has grown only two per cent since 1980, and is down 17 per cent in Oceania.
“The most serious decline was Europe, which had a net loss of 78,090 priests during this period, representing a 32 per cent decline in this population,” said the CARA report.
“Globally, the ratio of Catholics per priest worsened, as the number of Catholics per priest increased from 1,895 in 1980 to 3,126 in 2012.”
Credit: Daily Mail Online