The church's own returns put baptised Catholics at roughly 1.4 billion, comfortably the largest religious body under a single government on earth. Those are baptismal registers rather than counts of practice, and the gap between the two is enormous in some countries and small in others: measured against this atlas's own figure for the world's Christian population, the baptismal count alone comes to well over half, while independent demographic surveys, which count self-identification rather than parish registers, have generally put the Catholic share of the world's Christians closer to half.
The distribution has moved. Europe, which supplied the church's law, its liturgy and most of its popes for a thousand years, is now a minority share and a declining one, with weekly attendance in single-digit percentages across much of the continent. Latin America still holds the largest regional bloc but has been losing members steadily to Pentecostal and evangelical churches for four decades. Sub-Saharan Africa is where the growth is, in members, in vocations and increasingly in influence.
Three live disputes are worth naming without taking a side. The abuse crisis has produced state inquiries in Ireland, Australia, Germany, France and the United States, findings of institutional concealment, and settlements that have bankrupted dioceses; it is the single largest cause of the church's loss of authority in the West. The liturgy is contested again: permission for the older Latin Mass was widened in 2007 and sharply restricted in 2021, and the restriction is resented. And the church is pulling in two directions at once on sexuality and church discipline, with German bishops pressing for change and African bishops publicly refusing it, most visibly over the 2023 permission for non-liturgical blessings of couples in irregular situations.