Catholicism, but not as we know it

Oh look, an interesting post from Club Troppo.  (Doesn't happen often enough, these days.)

Paul Frijters looks at the demographic health of the Catholic Church, noting the decline in Europe and Australia, but the surprising growth in Asia and Africa.

According to the Catholic Church itself (which measures things partially on the basis of baptisms), its followers numbered 1.3 billion adherents by 2014 making Catholicism the largest religion on the planet and the largest branch on the tree of Christianity that holds about 2.2 billion adherents. Its strongholds in Latin America and Southern Africa are looking rock-solid, and conversion rates in the new centers of Asia (China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, etc.) are looking very healthy indeed. Catholicism is by far the biggest and probably fastest growing of the Christian faiths.

This is all rather interesting for what it means about the future of the character of the Church.   I think African priests, coming from societies where belief in supernatural influence in daily life has not become foreign as it has in the West, are nearly always very conservative and very "by the book", in the way the Church used to be here prior to the 60's.  

What I am not sure about is the likely doctrinal character of Asian priests, particularly Chinese.   I don't think they are likely to be quite in the same ballpark as African ones, but I could be wrong.

Paul notes this about them:

It is, speaking as a pure outsider to these religious games, very interesting to see how successful the Catholic\Christian message is amongst the Chinese in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and even in China itself. In Singapore, the proportion of Christians went up from 10% in 1990 to around 20% now, and a little under half of them are Roman Catholic.

 The multicultural aspect of Catholic congregations in many parts of Australia is something that I personally find very appealing about it.   But the cultural conflict between the doctrinally conservative and more liberal wings in Western countries is only likely to be exacerbated by the use of Africa (and possibly some Asian) priests here.