Originally published at The Catholic Thing
The 2025 Annuario Pontificio and the 2023 Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae reports, prepared by the Vatican’s Central Office for Church Statistics, reveal a notable growth of the Catholic population worldwide between 2022 and 2023, with a 1.15 percent increase in the global Catholic population: from approximately 1.39 billion Catholics in 2022 to 1.406 billion in 2023. Africa registered the greatest growth, with the Catholic population there increasing by 3.31 percent. The Americas have the most Catholics: 47.8 percent of the global total.
