In anticipation of the Popes visit there in May, the Vatican Information Service released today the following profile of the Church in Portugal.

Portugal ... has a population of 10,610,000 of whom 9,368,000 (88.3 percent) are Catholic. There are 21 ecclesiastical circumscriptions and 4,830 parishes. Currently there are 52 bishops, 3,797 priests, 6,007 religious, 594 lay members of secular institutes and 63,906 catechists. Minor seminarians number 279, and major seminarians 444.A total of 129,230 children and young people attend 900 centres of Catholic education, from kindergartens to universities. Other institutions belonging to the Church, or run by priests or religious in Portugal include 34 hospitals, 155 clinics, 799 homes for the elderly or disabled, 663 orphanages and nurseries, 55 family counselling centres and other pro-life centres, 462 centres for education and social rehabilitation, and 168 institutions of other kinds.

Two things to remark. First, doing the math reveals that 99.999% of the Catholics in that country are lay people, a figure that reinforces the need for an ecclesiology that never forgets that the clergy and vowed religious are a tiny minority of the Church and for the recognition that to assess the health of a Church in any place, the most important thing to study is the health of the laity. Statistics wont tell us that. Second, the second paragraph, after statistics on Catholic education, lists an impressive number of other institutions run by members of the Church, something that might help us to keep in mind the many and often overlooked ways in which the Church is an effective institutional presence in the wider society.