How New Life Left the Catholic World
From Manila to Madrid, secularisation has emptied pews and cradles. Institutions have no answer. Revival, religious and demographic, lies at the margins. By Kaiser Bauch.
In recent years, the chattering classes in the Philippines have been forced to adopt a new set of buzzwords that, until recently, had rarely been used in national policy debates. Terms such as population ageing and sub-replacement fertility—once mainly associated with wealthy countries—are now entering everyday discourse about the future of the Southeast Asian archipelago.
Between 2017 and 2022, the fertility rate fell from 2.7 children per woman to 1.9. Preliminary estimates for 2024 suggest a further drop to around 1.65. In the capital region of Manila, the fertility rate was just 1.2 in 2022. The Philippines remains a young country, with a median age of about 26, and it will take time before the full consequences of declining fertility are felt domestically. The first sectors to feel the pressure may even be ones that are abroad: industries that have long relied on a steady supply of Filipino migrant workers—such as nursing in the West, construction in the Middle East, and domestic work in East Asia.
In the short term, the Philippines may benefit economically from a rising share of working-age adults and fewer young dependents. “Unfortunately, it won’t last long. In the Philippines context, it may last one to two decades” said Arsenio Balisacan, the secretary of the National Economic and Development Authority. In the longer term, there are serious reasons for concern.
One of the hallmarks of the country’s social transformation—inevitably affecting childbearing as well—has been secularisation. The influence of the Philippines’ dominant religious institution, the Catholic Church (to which close to 80% of the population belongs), has been significantly weakened. After a bitter national debate in 2012 between reformers and conservatives, a bill was passed that lifted many restrictions on the use and availability of contraception, made sex education compulsory in schools, and required government health centres to distribute free condoms. In 2014, the Supreme Court upheld the law. Meanwhile, the share of Catholics attending church on a weekly basis has fallen by about a third. This sweeping wave of secularisation alongside very low fertility numbers is a pattern that has become increasingly characteristic of what were formerly Catholic-majority countries.
The Catholic Conundrum
Demographers have long noticed a distinct pattern in the demographics of Catholic societies. Throughout the 20th century, and up until roughly the 1980s, fertility rates in strongly Catholic European countries were notably higher than those in Protestant ones.
Between 1970 and 1975, Spanish women had on average 2.85 children each—nearly a whole child more than the Swedish average of 1.91. By 2000–2005, however, Spain’s fertility rate had collapsed to 1.29, half a child below Sweden’s 1.67. This pattern was typical: Portugal and Italy followed a similar trajectory, while countries such as Norway and Denmark remained comparatively higher.
A similar pattern has also played out in countries where substantial Protestant and Catholic populations coexist, such as Germany, the United States (where this pattern applies mainly to the “older” Catholic immigrant groups—Italians, Irish, and Poles—while Catholic fertility in more recent years has been sustained largely by Latin American, especially Mexican, immigration), and the Netherlands.
What once might seem a Southern European peculiarity has clearly become a broader global trend. Catholic post-communist countries—most notably Poland—have followed the same path, and over the past decade low Catholic fertility has turned into a worldwide phenomenon. Latin American countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina have shocked many demographers with how quickly their fertility rates have fallen—some now match the levels seen in their southern European counterparts.
Of the twelve countries with the largest Catholic populations in the world (see the graphic below), only one now has a fertility rate above replacement level: the Democratic Republic of Congo—one of the poorest countries on the planet, deep in the interior of the African continent, where a considerable share of the population remains illiterate.
Since these countries are from different continents, levels of economic development, and cultural contexts, it is beyond the scope of a single essay to explore each case in depth. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether there is a root cause that all of them share.
Old Stock Feminism and a Drought of Nuns
There are a number of theories—sometimes competing, sometimes complementary—that sociologists have proposed to explain the collapse in fertility among Catholics. The French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd suggests that higher fertility during the modern era is linked to the historical position of women in different societies.
In societies where women traditionally held a relatively stronger status compared with men—often determined by the family structures that existed among peasants before modernity, mass literacy, and urbanisation—the later wave of female emancipation after the 1960s was less socially disruptive.
By contrast, the lowest fertility rates tend to be found in societies where there is a sharp cultural tension between deeply rooted ideals of a strict division of gender roles and the modern reality of women studying and working. Historically, women occupied a comparatively stronger position in places such as Scandinavia, the Anglosphere, and France, while the opposite was true in German-speaking Europe, Korea, or Italy. In this view—illustrated by Catholic France being historically “feminist,” or Protestant Germany being historically “chauvinist”—religion itself is not the decisive factor; rather, religious affiliation was layered over much older kinship and family structures.
The strength of this theory is that it helps explain the seemingly paradoxical fact that, among secular populations in wealthy countries, people in more progressive and egalitarian countries such as Britain, France, or Scandinavia have markedly higher fertility than those in societies usually seen as more conservative, such as Japan, Poland, or Italy. In reality, this apparent paradox is not a paradox at all.
The theory also challenges the common assumption that the way to boost fertility is simply to become more “Scandinavian”—that is, more egalitarian and progressive, while greatly expanding state support for families. Such arguments often ignore the deeper anthropological factors that shape how similar policies can produce very different outcomes in different societies.
However, this explanation also tends to overlook the significant impact of fertility among the religious minorities who remain observant even after secularisation sweeps through society. More on that later.
Another line of explanation focuses on practical differences in the services the Catholic church provided. Before the mid-1960s, the Catholic Church offered a wide range of family-supporting institutions—schools, childcare, welfare services—often staffed by nuns. These helped to lower the cost of raising children for Catholic families.
After the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), however, the number of nuns and clergy fell sharply. As Church-run services contracted, the cost of child-rearing rose—particularly in Catholic countries where these services had once been widespread. Studies show that countries experiencing the steepest decline in the number of nuns per Catholic also tended to see the largest falls in fertility. Moreover, the argument that the decline in Church-run family services mattered more than the decline in religiosity itself is supported by the fact that fertility correlates much more strongly with the number of nuns—who typically provided these services—than with the number of priests.
However, while this correlation is very strong in some Catholic populations (such as Ireland, the Netherlands, and the UK), it is far less convincing in others (such as Poland or Portugal), and it tells us little about non-European countries.
The theory also risks focusing too narrowly on the material impact of services provided by nuns, without asking a deeper question: why did the number of nuns decline so sharply in the first place? As Emmanuel Todd argues, the collapse in recruitment of nuns and priests appears to be the earliest sign of oncoming secularisation. While the study argues that church attendance does not explain falling fertility rates as neatly as the decline in nuns per capita, it is important to remember that church attendance is only a proxy for religiosity, not a perfect measure of it. People may continue attending services out of habit or for social reasons even after their inner faith has weakened.
By contrast, the collapse in the recruitment of nuns—and the decline in fertility itself—appears to be a far stronger indicator of falling religiosity, since becoming a nun or deciding to have a child (both considered good proxies for religiosity by sociologists) are both profound, life-altering commitments.
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