The Catholic Church in China registered 48,556 baptisms in 2017, reflecting the vitality and missionary strength of the Catho- lic communities there, according to a report by Fides, the news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
The figures likely are in- complete, however, given the difficulty of procuring data from Catholic communities in the rural parts of China, the report said.
But the numbers still “reflect the vitality and the missionary dynamism of a community that fully lives faith,” said the organization conducting the annual survey: the Faith Institute for Cultural Studies, a church-run organization based in Shijiazh- uang. Fides republished the organization’s findings Feb. 15.
The province of Hebei which consistently has the highest number of baptisms each year of all the Chinese provinces – topped the list again with 11,899 bapti- sms, the report said. The Arch- diocese of Beijing registered 1,099 baptisms, while the Dio- cese of Ningxia had 128 new Catholics baptized. China’s north west autonomous region of Xinjiang, where the majority of the population is Muslim, registered 66 baptisms. The Qinghai province had 54 baptisms, and isolated communities such as Hainan Island in southern China and Tibet had 38 and 11 baptisms, respectively.
