Catholicism is the largest religion in the EU, with 44 percent of people self-identifying as Catholic in a 2023 Eurobarometer survey. Though virtually no one identified as Catholic in the Protestant Nordics or Orthodox Greece and Bulgaria, they represented up to 70 percent of respondents in Italy; 80 percent in Portugal, Croatia and Lithuania; and over 90 percent in Poland.
For now, Europe’s broad and historically rooted Catholic machine also dwarfs that of other continents, with far more priests than any other continent, according to a 2022 statistical update the Catholic Church published last year.
Zooming out to the world stage, however, Europe stands out as a continent on the wane.
In 2022, the number of Catholics increased in four out of five continents. “Only in Europe there is a decrease,” the church’s statistical update said.
Despite a remarkable uptick in the number of adult baptisms in Belgium and France, the countries have also registered major decreases in overall baptism numbers over the past decades. Countries like Belgium and Germany have also seen a significant number of requests to be removed from the baptism register.
During this conclave, Europe will have three times as many voting cardinals than Africa. But while one-fifth of the world’s Catholics were in Europe, Africa housed almost as many, and it had the largest growing Catholic population thanks to countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya.
Catholics represent just a tiny share of Asia’s population, but they make up 11 percent of the global Catholic population and the church also registered growing numbers there.
The Americas stand out as the most Catholic of all. The continents are home to about half of the world’s Catholic population, buoyed by Brazil. Yet, like Africa, South America’s cardinals are outnumbered three-to-one by Europe’s cardinals during this conclave.
