My Take | The Vatican knows China is good for business
As a spiritual enterprise, organised religion is all about numbers and, with 1.37 billion souls to be saved on the mainland, it’s no surprise relations with Beijing are warming
Organised religion is in the spiritual business. And like any business, it’s ultimately about numbers.
Now, if you are the chief executive officer, or rather the Pope in Rome, surveying the state of your global Catholic business in terms of customer base, what do you see?
Well, growth trends have been negative across Europe for decades and are likely to be irreversible. How sad, you tell yourself, when not too long ago, the West was still referred to as Christendom.
You see growth in North and South America, but it has been sluggish or is decelerating.
In Oceania, that is, in places such as Australia and New Zealand, the numbers are holding up. But their relatively low populations could never make up a key part of the business. Africa and the Far East? Now that’s where all the real growths is!
For people who may be puzzled by what appears to be a “sudden” rapprochement between China and the Vatican, or if you are just interested in Catholicism as a global institution, I urge you to consult a 2015 study called “Global Catholicism: Trends & Forecasts”, by the Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a research group under Georgetown University in Washington.