Twelve years of Francis' pontificate have just been celebrated. The Vatican reports are always self-congratulatory.
It is very difficult to cover, in a single appraisal, the reality of the Church, which is vast and with differences between countries -- but from a certain point it is possible to contemplate the surroundings; I can do it, then, from this corner of the far south that is Argentina, a nation that is (or was?) mostly Catholic. As the saying goes, “one button is example enough."
The decadence of the Church is evident. The bishops live up in their own clouds. The seminaries are populated by young people whose number can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There is even one seminary, a hundred years old, in which in this 2025, not a single seminarian entered! Vocations are not showing up. The command of Christ (“make disciples of all nations - pánta ta éthne - to be my disciples”) has yet to be fulfilled. Where are the apostles? The people are bewildered; many of the faithful long for better times.
I think that two laments of Pope Paul VI are still valid: “We expected - after the Second Vatican Council - a flourishing springtime and a harsh winter came”; “through some crack the smoke of Satan has seeped into the temple of God.” The ecclesial presence in society is closely limited; journalists notice it, because they recognize, with a historical outlook, that, in our country, the Catholic Church has always been something official. We are considered a Catholic country. But baptisms do not exist; the birth rate in Argentina has plummeted: in 2023, with 460,902 births, the lowest figure of the last 50 years has been registered! And marriage no longer exists, now there are just “couples.” The public presence of the Church is non-existent; it only filters in the journalistic order only if it makes political judgments, especially against the government.
The Church must occupy herself with her specific task: to make Christians out of men and women, to imbue their conduct with the commands of Scripture and Tradition, and to lead them to Heaven. The successive crises of the clergy have had a detrimental effect, above all because they increase the alienation of society from the Christian ideal. There is no Christian culture; Catholic universities include a partial theological information, but they do not fulfill their main function, which is to make the Church present in the Argentine society, that is to say, to create a Christian culture. I do not know of Catholic thinkers who stand out, as, for example, Carlos Sacheri; murdered in 1974, as he was leaving Mass, in San Isidro, in front of his wife and seven children, by terrorists of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP).
The Statistical Yearbook of the Church has just been published, with figures corresponding to the 2022-2023 biennium. It is revealed in it that the number of bishops has increased: from 5353 in 2022 to 5430 in 2023. At the same time, the number of priests has decreased: at the end of 2023, there were 406,996 priests worldwide, a decrease of 734 compared to 2022. And, in the case of seminarians, the situation is more than worrisome: there has been a sustained drop since 2012; and it has gone from 108,481, in 2022, to 106,495, in 2023. In other words: the number of priests and seminarians is decreasing, while the number of bishops is growing! In Argentina we also have an inflation of these: in the last twelve years the number of auxiliary bishops has multiplied. And there are dioceses in which the number of bishops exceeds or equals the number of seminarians.
As a Catholic, I believe in the Church and I love her; I want to see her flourish. I pray for her and for the Supreme Pontiff; for the health of his body and, above all, his soul. Sixty years after the closing of Vatican II, it is time to face reality. The “Church on the move,” in search of those who do not know Christ, or have distanced themselves from Him, must not be a “Church on the run” from her own essence and mission.
