Global South as growing force in Catholic Church

By contrast, in Europe, the only part of the world where Christianity is on the decline, the number of Christians (including Russians) is set to drop by 18 million by 2025. There are officially 531 million Christians in Europe, making them still the largest single group in the world.

But only 10 percent of them go to church on a regular basis.

There is "increasing tension" between the liberal North and the "surging Southern religious revolution," Jenkins says.

Catholicism has followed roughly the same population shift as Christianity as a whole during the past century, according to Johnson.

Despite losing believers to a new wave of evangelical churches taking Latin America by storm, Catholicism has continued to grow there in large part simply because of high birth rates.

In Asia and Africa, meanwhile, the rapid rise of Catholicism is fueled as much by birth rates as it is by the discovery of the faith.

In 1900, 68 percent of the world's Catholics were in Europe; today just 25 percent are, according to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity.

Latin American Catholics, meanwhile, now make up 43 percent of the world's total, while Catholic Asians now make up 11 percent. And Africa, which had 1 percent of Catholics worldwide in 1900, is now home to 13 percent.

For many, Christianity has already reached a historic turning point. Archbishop John Onaiyekan, of Abuja, Nigeria, suggested recently that "priests from places like Nigeria can reevangelize Europe." Hundreds of years after Europeans began evangelizing the world, African missionaries are now traveling to the Old Continent to revive the faith.

Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria, a charismatic Vatican diplomat, is a much touted "papabile," one who could be pope. But few believe the Catholic Church is ready for a black pope.

Cardinals Claudio Hummes of Brazil, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina are perhaps more-probable Southern contenders. A few outspoken Southern cardinals have indicated in the past that a pope from the developing world is what the Catholic Church badly needs.

"The world is looking forward to an Asian or Latin American pope," Cardinal Telsphore Placidus Troppo, one of India's three cardinal electors, said in December 2004.

But the arithmetic of the conclave of cardinals reveals the limits of the developing world's clout. For instance, even though 43 percent of the world's Catholics live in Latin America, there are just 21 Latin American cardinals among the 117 eligible to elect the next pope. Even if all Southern cardinals united behind one candidate, their 45 votes would fall short of the needed two-thirds majority.

Some experts expect the papacy to return to an Italian - a tradition that held for nearly five centuries before John Paul II.

"The world changes, but the church doesn't," said a Vatican source, asking not to be named.

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