The number of Catholic priests in the world has increased consistently over the past decade and the “relative superabundance” of priests in Europe and North America has begun to attenuate, the Vatican said. The “relative superabundance” refers to the percentage of the world’s priests who live in Europe and North America compared to the percentage of the world’s Catholics who live there. Anticipating some of the figures that would be released in the Statistical Yearbook of the Church later in February, the Vatican newspaper said that in 1999, just more than 15 percent of the world’s priests lived and ministered in Central and South America while 42.4 percent of the world’s Catholics lived there.
At the end of 2009, the percentage had changed slightly: Latin America had 17.3 percent of the priests and 42.2 percent of the world’s Catholics. L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, published its article Feb. 10 with a small selection of statistics from the yearbook reporting worldwide church figures as of Dec. 31, 2009. The newspaper article focused on the statistics’ demonstration of 10 years of steady growth in the number of Catholic priests in the world. A more complete set of statistics was expected to be released when the Vatican had finished printing the yearbook.
VATICAN CITY (CNS)