Catholic Church sees decrease in nuns and monks, members of clergy

As BBC reports, the Catholic Church has seen a dramatic decrease in the number of "members of the consecrated life"—basically, nuns and monks, but also priests and deacons. This, despite a reported overall increase in Church membership to over 1.1 billion.

Inherently skeptical of such attempts to quantify religiosity, I did some poking around online. If the National Council of Churches' Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches is any indicator, then it can be expected that such statistics (which are reported annually by participating churches to the NCC) are representative of the state of the Church two years prior to the year of a given report being published, as the 2010 numbers are representative of polling that occurred in 2008. Given this two year lag time, I would be interested to see the 2012 figures given the torrent of controversy that engulfed the Church earlier this year.

BBC correspondents also pointed out the increase in membership "failed to keep pace with the overall increase in world population."

Even still, if the Catholic Church continues to grow in the face of all the scandal that plagues it it will not be to my surprise, as the troubled third world is being evangelized evermore; a nettlesome side effect of the much needed help they are receiving.