If the future of the Catholic Church is to have a new lingua franca, there’s a good chance it may be Tagalog, one of the languages spoken in the Philippines.
The archipelagic country in Southeast Asia, which is already home to the largest Christian population in the Asian continent, is poised to reshape Catholicism's clerical landscape, especially when the homelands of Europe languish in vocational decline.
Ordination and seminary formation rates have been climbing steadily across the Philippine archipelago. While centuries-old seminaries across the globe struggle to meet minimum class sizes, Asia is bucking the trend with a 1.6 per cent rise in new priests and a narrow increase of 0.1 per cent in the number of women committing themselves to holy orders in Southeast Asia.
