Research: There are more Orthodox and fewer Catholics in Europe

Most residents of Central and Eastern Europe practice Orthodoxy, their number being on the rise against the falling number of Catholics, reports the press-service of the American Research Center Pew Research Center, writes Interfax.

All in all, nearly 75% of the population in the region identify themselves as Orthodox. These are citizens of ten countries with Orthodoxy as a dominant religion, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Georgia, Armenia and Moldova, according to the survey conducted from June 2015 to July 2016 in 18 countries among more than 25 thousand people.

Apart from that, the Orthodox denomination is formed by religious minorities of Bosnia (35%), Latvia (31%), and Estonia (25%).

A share of Catholics among the population in the region makes up nearly 18%. They form a religious majority in Poland, Croatia, Lithuania and Hungary.

As the authors of the research point to, the biggest countries within the region are marked by the sharp increase of the Orthodox share and decrease of the Catholic one: since the USSR collapse an amount of Russians who affiliate themselves to Orthodoxy has grown from 37% in 1991 to 71%. At the same time a tendency in historically Catholic countries is opposite. For instance, in Poland the number of Catholic believers over this period has shrunk from 96% to 87%, in Hungary – from 63% to 56%, in the Czech Republic – from 44% to 21%.

Upon that Catholics in Central and Eastern Europe tend to visit a church more often than their Orthodox counterparts.

Despite a big quantity of believers in most countries of the region, a daily prayer is not common for its residents. In fact, as few as 17% of respondents from Russia and 27% from Poland and Serbia pray at least once a day. Moldova has the highest rate of such believers – 48%.

14% of the population in the region is constituted by atheists or religiously unaffiliated citizens, the biggest incidence established in the Czech Republic (72%) and Estonia (45%).