The Bergoglian Age in numbers: in ancient Christian countries, but not only, the number of Catholics is declining. Of course, there are many reasons for this, such as secularization, urbanization, competition from competing ideologies and religions, and the unravelling of family units and traditional values in many places. But the statistics point to a worrying acceleration since the start of Pope Francis' pontificate, particularly in places where bishops and indeed the Church as a whole pride themselves on their progressivism and their entry into the marvellous synodality.
Germany, spearhead of Catholic progressivism, loses 500,000 Catholics a year
A prime example is Germany, spearhead of progressivism in the Church, whose dioceses are, along with the United States, the Vatican's main source of money. In August 2024, Riposte Catholique published statistics on “church exits” in Germany, showing that while their bishops are fleeing ahead in a less and less Catholic “synodal path,” German Catholics are losing interest in their religion:
“Church departures declined compared to last year: 402,694, to be compared with the 2022 figure of 522,821 departures, but the statistical office notes that this is nevertheless the second-highest figure in the history of church departure statistics. If one adds 'deaths, entries and moves,' the number of Church members in Germany has fallen by 591,718. At national level, the statistics still count around 20.3 million Catholics at the reference date of December 31, 2023. A year earlier, the figure was still 20.94 million.
As there are also 18.56 million Protestants in Germany, the majority of Germans are no longer Christian - or rather, no longer officially attached to one of the country's main Christian churches. As a reminder, in 2020 Germany still had 22 million Catholics and 20 million Protestants for a population of 83 million. The decline of the Catholic population can also be seen in another statistic, shared by Katolisch.de on July 9: “In 2011, there were still 23 cities with a Catholic majority in Germany. Now only Münster, Paderborn, Bottrop and Trier remain. In Regensburg and Ingolstadt, for example, the proportion of Catholics has fallen by almost a quarter”
Above all, church departures are accelerating, in line with the dynamics of the “German Synodal Way” and thus with the line of thought promoted by Pope Francis: “if in 2010 181,000 Catholics and 141,000 Protestants had left their churches, in 2020 they were 221,000 and 220,000 respectively.
In 2011, there were 24.07 million Catholics and 23.37 million Protestants - the two religions then accounted for 60% of Germans”.
And of course, fewer Catholics means less tax redistributed to the Church and therefore to the dioceses, and consequently to the Vatican - we'll come back to this: “in 2023, the revenues of the 27 German dioceses will amount to 6.51 billion euros. This represents 330 million euros, or 5% less than in 2022. When inflation is taken into account, the decline is even more marked."
In neighboring Belgium
Equally progressive, the practice has fallen below 1% of the population, and in formerly more practicing Flanders, by 2022 70% of documents registering requests for euthanasia were written in Dutch - the language of the Flemish minority. Above all, there are barely 30 seminarians left for the whole country, as the head of the Namur seminary explained to the parliamentary commission on abuses in the Church in March 2024: “at the John XXIII seminary in Louvain, 15 seminarians are currently studying for the five Flemish dioceses, and in Namur 17 seminarians are studying for the French-speaking part of the country [including 5 from Liège and 8 from Brussels in 2023].”
Switzerland: 34,000 fewer Catholics per year
In Switzerland, it's no better - statistics for 2022 published online by Riposte Catholique show a 10% acceleration in exits from the Catholic Church compared to the previous year, and above all a higher prevalence of exits in the most progressive diocese, that of Basel :
“In 2022, 34,561 people left the Catholic Church in Switzerland, roughly the same number as in 2021, but significantly more than in previous years (in 2021: 34,182; 2020: 31,410; 2019: 31,772), notes the SPI in a report published on October 30, 2023; compared with 1080 entering the Church and 910 in 2021. At the end of 2022, church membership stood at around 2.89 million (in 2021: 2.96 million). The cantons with the biggest losses are Basel-Stadt (3 out of 100), Aargau (2.7 out of 100), and Solothurn (2.2 out of 100).”
Italy: young people on the verge of extinction
In Italy, religious practice is holding steady... but not among young people, and the cessation of celebrations during the pandemic was an accelerating factor... as was the submission of many Italian bishops to health measures that were as intrusive as they were changeable and ineffective.
In August 2023, Riposte Catholique translated the report by the Italian Institute of Statistics (Istat), which took stock of so much decline - and of Italy's low birth rate:
“Over the past twenty years, religious practice in Italy has steadily declined, down to just half: from 36.4% of the population in 2001 who declared themselves 'practicing,' to less than 19% last year, so fewer than one in five people. The biggest 'leap' was recorded between 2019 and 2020, with the loss of 4 points of mass-goers. This was the year of the pandemic, during which 'face-to-face' celebrations were suspended, but church attendance was permitted."
According to the latest data from the Diocese of Milan, one of the largest in the world, baptisms have fallen from 37-38,000 in the 2000s to 20,000 today. Even taking into account the falling birth rate, this figure is low. As for marriages in the diocese, they have fallen from 18,000 a year in the 1990s to 4,000 today.
Churches are gradually emptying in all age groups, but the most obvious decline is among young people (18-24) and teenagers (14-17). While overall religious practice has fallen by 50% over the last twenty years, for these age groups the decline is two-thirds”.
Poland, South Korea: vocations down by half
In the de-Christianized, aging dioceses of old Europe, where the birth rate is often low, Polish or even South Korean priests often offer an alternative to African or Indian Fidei Donum. But for how much longer? These two countries are experiencing a drastic drop in vocations.
In July 2023, Riposte Catholique reported that the gathering of some 1,400 Polish seminarians at the Jasna Gora shrine was the tree that hid the forest of collapsing vocations:
“In 2021, admissions to Polish seminaries fell by 20%, Poland suffering the double shock after Amoris Laetitia and the closure of diocesan churches during Holy Week 2020, under the pretext of Covid and the so-called 'health' restrictions thereafter - something that had never happened, even under the Communist regime. The introduction of communion by hand and other Rome-inspired innovations didn't help matters either.
“Father Piotr Kot, president of the Conference of Rectors of Major Seminaries in Poland, told the Catholic news agency KAI that 356 seminarians had begun their studies in 2021. This compares with 441 in 2020, a drop of around 20%. The figures were 498 in 2019 and 828 in 2012”. That's a drop of half (57%) since 2012.”
In South Korea, it's no better, reports Fides in February 2025 - not least because of the world's worst birth rate (0.72), but not only because of it, the number of seminarians has fallen by 40% in ten years, and the number of baptized is plummeting as the generations get younger: “according to data from the Dicastery for Evangelization, in 2013 there were a total of 1,264 major seminarians in the various dioceses of the Korean Church. Ten years later, in 2023, there were 790 seminarians, a drop of around 40% in ten years. If we look even further upstream at the number of baptized Catholics, in the official statistics of the Korean Bishops' Conference (to 2023), we see that baptized children between the ages of 0 and 4 represent 1.8% of the Korean population; in the 5-9 age bracket, baptized children are 3.9%; and between the ages of 10 and 14, they represent 5.8% of the total Korean population. If we compare these figures with the overall figure, according to which Catholics represent 11.5% of the entire Korean nation, we can see that as the generations go by, their numbers diminish."
In Argentina, half as many seminarians and 80% fewer entrants in 25 years
The statistics on the decline in priestly vocations are even more marked in Argentina, the home country of both the Pope and Cardinal Fernandez. Moral affairs don't help: Pope Francis tried to clear a pedophile priest when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Father Julio Cesare Grassi, sentenced to fifteen years in prison in 2009 and incarcerated since 2013 (just as he protected to the bitter end Bishop Zanchetta of Oran, Argentina, who was forced to resign in 2017 but whom he immediately rehired as advisor to the Vatican's administration of the Apostolic See patrimony, but who, in 2025, was sentenced to four years and six months in prison for raping seminarians, a sentence confirmed by the Court of Appeals).
The result of secularization and the Francis effect is a collapse in vocations: “whereas the country had 2,260 seminarians in 1990, there will be just 481 diocesan seminarians in 2024 according to the American website The Pillar. While the number of religious seminarians is not available, it should be remembered that there were 351 in 2020. It can be estimated that there will be fewer than 900 seminarians in Argentina. There is therefore a clear drop in vocations, which is also reflected in the low number of entries to seminaries. This year, there were only 57 entries into diocesan seminaries. As a reminder, in 1997, there were 256 entries, a drop of almost 80% in twenty-five years."
Latin America turns Evangelical
The April 2018 issue of Hérodote magazine provides statistics on the subcontinent as a whole, and looks back at a major shift: Latin America... isn't so much Latin anymore.
“If, in the early 1970s, 90% of Latin Americans claimed to be Catholics, today the figure is just 65%. This decline in Catholicism takes three main forms. Firstly, a decline in the number of Catholics accompanied by an increase in the number of Evangelicals. This is the case in the region's most populous countries, Brazil and Mexico, where Catholics fell from 95% to 61% and 99% to 81% respectively between 1970 and 2014."
This decline is all the more striking given that these are the two countries in the world that still have the highest number of Catholics: Brazil with 172.2 million baptized, or 26.4% of Catholics in the Americas, followed by Mexico with 110.9 million baptized. The decline in the number of Catholics in Brazil is accompanied by a significant increase in membership of Protestant and Evangelical churches, which account for 26% of the population.
The second form of Catholicism's decline is the transformation of the religious landscape in Central American countries, where Catholicism has become a minority religion. All of these countries now have a Catholic population of less than 50%, compared with over 90% in the 1970s. The decline of Catholicism in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala is all the more striking in view of the strong roots of liberation theology in the 1980s-1990s, and the role played by the Catholic Church in accompanying victims of abuse by both the military dictatorships and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. These three countries, plus Honduras, are also the only ones where Evangelical churches could eventually become the majority: in Nicaragua, 30.4% of the population have joined them; in El Salvador, 35.3%; in Guatemala, 38.2; and in Honduras, 43.9%. Finally, in Chile, it's not the evangelicals but the atheists who are gaining in power, with 16% of the population, while Catholics are declining.
As a result, in 2014, countries that were still monolithically Catholic in 1950 and over 90% in the early 1970s lost 20% of the faithful in Argentina, 34% in Costa Rica, 31% in Brazil, 43% in El Salvador, 47% in Honduras - half of the total, 43% in Nicaragua, 15% in Mexico, 31% in Puerto Rico and 20% in Venezuela. And the number of Catholics has been falling ever since.
A map put online by the Center for Orthodox Journalists in 2024 shows that while Paraguay still has 89% Catholics and Mexico 74%, as well as Colombia, Ecuador and Peru 70%, there are only 57% in Brazil, 52.5% in Chile, 49% in Argentina, now one of the least Catholic countries in Latin America, and 37% in Uruguay. Meanwhile, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua now have between 36% and 43% Evangelicals, Venezuela 23%, Brazil 25%, Mexico just 4.5% and Argentina 7%.
By the way, Argentina has also dethroned Chile regarding the number of people who claim to be agnostics or atheists - 40% of the population. And 13% in Brazil, 5% in communist Venezuela, and 16% in Mexico. Almost half of the Catholic population in a country that was 91% Catholic in 1970: 40% atheist, irreligious or agnostic - the Pope Francis effect is in full swing in Argentina, a real hit.
Will the great Catholic decline affect Africa?
Faced with such a catastrophic picture, some would like to believe that Africa is a Christian sanctuary resisting decline. It's true that vocations remain at a high level, and many African dioceses twinned with the vocation-strapped dioceses of old Europe send them seminarians and deacons to enable them to keep the parish geography at arm's length. Admittedly, Africa has spearheaded the refusal of Fiducia supplicans, and Cardinal Ambongo mentioned the “loss in terms of value, a cultural and moral decadence of the West” to whom he wished, from Kinshasa in DR Congo on January 16, 2024 a “happy demise.”
Yet some bishops' conferences are already worried. In Ghana, the number of Catholics fell by a third between the two censuses of 2010 and 2021, the bishops' conference warned in 2023: “The members of the Ghana Catholic Bishops' Conference (GCBC) propose the development of well-structured catechesis and formation programs, among other proposals, to address the declining number of Catholic faithful" in this West African country. The 2021 Population and Housing Census (2021 PHC) in Ghana shows that the number of Catholics has declined from 15.1% to 10.0% since the 2010 census.”
