For this Ash Wednesday market size post, we looked up the size of the worldwide Catholic population, presented below. According to the source, half of all Catholics (49.4%) live in the Americas, a region of the world that contains about 14% of total world population.
Geographic reference: World
Year: 2009
Market size: 1.181 billion.
Source: “World Catholic Population Growing; Mixed Results on Priestly, Religious Vocations,” CatholicCulture.org, February 21, 2011, available online here.
Original source: Annuario Pontifico, 2011 edition, The Vatican.
This is a quite striking statistic — nearly half in the U.S. Your sources are quite “catholic” to use an old meaning of that word, namely “universal.”
Well, we actually don’t mind slow…
But thank you for the suggestion.