Vatican count

Press, Volume CXIII, Issue 33154, 19 February 1973, Page 13

Vatican count

(N.Z.P. A.-Reuter—Copyright) VATICAN CITY, Feb. 17.

The Vatican’s new statistical yearbook said today there were an estimated 659 million Roman Catholics in the world—lB.4 per cent of the world’s population.

The Vatican counts as Roman Catholics all people who have been baptised in the church without reference to whether or not they practise their religion. The new volume, prepared by the Central Statistics Office in the Vatican Secretariat of State, is updated to December 31, 1970. A preface says the figures cannot be considered 100 per cent accurate because of the difficulty of obtaining information about “churches of silence” in such places as China, North Korea or the Soviet Union. It is the first time the Vatican has put on public sale a complete account of all Church statistics, although a similar volume covering 1969 was published last October for internal use.

The Roman Catholic population is divided into 191,398 parishes—of which 39,431 have no priest—and 79,217 mission stations or quasiparishes. Of these, however, only 8149 have a resident priest.

The statistical yearbook said that there were a total of 419,728 priests, or one to every 64,000 Roman Catholics.. The priests include 148,804 men who belong to religious orders. The rest are so-called “secular” priests attached to dioceses. Also listed are 309 deacons, 79,408 members of male religious orders who are not priests, and 1,004,304 nuns or sisters.

During 1970, the yearbook said, the number of secular priests declined by 1922 to a total of 270,294 a decline of 7 per cent. North America and Europe both had a decline of 9.2 per cent in the number of secular priests, while Africa increased by 26.3 per cent, and Asia by 26.1 per cent.