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The tables below represent statistics with regard to the Catholic Church by country.
Contents
Methodology
Most of the figures are taken from the CIA Factbook or PEW Research Center Surveys.
According to the CIA Factbook and the Pew Research Center, the five countries with the largest number of Catholics are, in decreasing order of population, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, the United States, and Italy.
The country where the membership of the church is the largest percentage of the population is Vatican City at 100%.
According to the Census of the 2016 Annuario Pontificio (Pontifical Yearbook), the number of Catholics in the world was about 1.272 billion at the end of 2014.
Conflicting numbers can be found in 2013 research conducted by Brazilian polling institute Datafolha. This report states that the percentage of the population in Brazil of Catholic religion, over the age of 16 years, is just 57%, well in contrast to the 64.63% published by CIA and to the 68.6% of Pew Research Center. Also, the 2010 Mexican Census showed this percentage to be 83.9% – against a 91.89% number in the CIA Factbook.
By country
By clicking on the icons in the column titles you can re-order the table by column.
By region
These percentages were calculated by using the above numbers. The first percentage, 4th column, is the percentage of population that is Catholic in a region (number in the region * 100/total population of the region). The last column shows the national Catholic percentage compared to the total Catholic population of the world (number in the region * 100/total R. C. population of the world).