This news won’t be surprising to those of us who have been following this sort of thing. But it’s still worrisome.

From the BBC:

Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006.

During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter.

The downward trend accelerated despite a steady increase in the membership of the Catholic Church to more than 1.1bn.

However, correspondents say even this failed to keep pace with the overall increase in world population.

On the back page of its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican published on Monday new statistics revealing that between 2005 and 2006 the number “members of the consecrated life” fell by just under 10%.

The number of members, predominantly women, some engaged only in constant prayer, others working as teachers, health workers and missionaries, fell 94,790 to 945,210.

The membership of the Roman Catholic Church has risen to 1.1bn

Of the total, 753,400 members were women, while 191,810 were men, including 136,171 priests and 532 permanent deacons.

The figures were published next to a report of Pope Benedict XVI’s meeting with nuns, monks and priests from many countries gathered in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome last weekend.

The BBC’s David Willey in the Italian capital says the accelerating downward trend must have caused concern to the Pope.

The Roman Catholic Church has an aging and diminishing number of parish and diocesan clergy and this latest fall is quite dramatic, our correspondent says.

The number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by about a quarter during the reign of Pope John Paul, and this further drop shows that new recruits are failing to replace those nuns who die, or decide to abandon their vows, he adds.

UPDATE: The Vatican may have misreported some of those initial numbers, according to this item:

The Vatican on Tuesday corrected a report published in its own newspaper which suggested the Roman Catholic Church has suffered a dramatic decline in the number of priests, monks and nuns. On Monday the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano mouthpiece published figures indicating that the number of men and women in religious orders had fallen by 94,000 or 10 per cent between 2005 and 2006.

“But the actual number was 7,230 and not 94,000,” Vatican spokesman Father Ciro Benedettini told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

“All the other statistics reported in the newspaper were correct,” Benedettini said.

According to the L’Osservatore Romano some 945,210 people belong to religious orders worldwide.

The majority – around 753,000 – consists of women serving as nuns, some devoted to constant prayer in cloister, others working as teachers, health workers and missionaries.

Male clerics, including around 136,000 priests, made up the rest of the total, L’Osservatore Romano said.