According to the recently published Vatican Yearbook, there are 1.27 billion Catholics in the world, comprising 17.8 percent of the world’s population. The number of baptized Catholics worldwide has also grown at a faster rate than that of the world’s population.

Despite the increase of Catholics worldwide, the yearbook noted a “less dynamic” growth of only 2 percent in Europe. While the continent is home to almost 40 percent of the Catholic global population, the percent of the world’s Catholics living in Europe has slowly decreased over the past nine years, it said.