Abstract
The World Christian Encyclopedia, third edition, contributes significantly to our understanding of the contemporary Catholic Church, the world’s largest single Christian community. Although the percentage of Catholics has held steady over the past century, the church’s demographic center has shifted markedly from the Global North to the Global South. The encyclopedia’s rich country profiles reveal multiple key trends in current global Catholicism, including the challenge of secularization, the continued rise of the charismatic movement, the importance of migration to Catholic growth, and the critical if controversial intertwining of the Catholic Church with national identity, public life, and social services.
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