Marco Tosatti has a brief post on a new study released by Analasis Digirtal which examines the state of the Church today.
The report shows that the Catholic population of the world today numbers some 1,160,000,000 and is growing by some 34,000 people every day. This is certainly good news and something to remember when we hear of the decline of the Church; it may be declining in the West, but in the East and the South it is booming.
The report also showed that there were some 1,600 Protestant denominations at the start of the twentieth century; in 2011, only a century later, there are some 42,000. So much for Jesus' prayer that "they might all be one."
If you would like your readers to be able review the actual statistics, you might send them to the referenced Status of Global Mission report (http://www.gordonconwell.edu/resources/documents/StatusOfGlobalMission.pdf) that was not released by the mispelled Analisis Digirital, that was misquoted by Marco Rosatti, and that was released, as it has been annually, by a prominent American protestant theological seminary.
ReplyDeleteOr, for even more information and background, you send them to the blog of the well-respected Catherine of Sienna Institute (http://siena.org/November-2011/fact-checking-the-vatican-insider) that exposes the sloppy and misleading work of the Vatican Insider.
The Vatican Insider has long proven itself to be one of those trust-but-verify publications.
Thanks, Ed.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it depends on who is writing for The Vatican Insider. Andrea Tornielli, for example, seems to be most always accurate.