The Church in India,Growth in Vocations

Jeff Ziegler has written very extensively about developments and growth of the Catholic Church  in the Catholic World Report.One of his most recent articles deals with the  growth and vitality in the American Church because of the presence of Spanish Catholics.In other issues of the Report , he has written beautifully about the growth of the Chruch in India and the major role played by the Syro-Malabar Church.
In the following article, a few quotes from his Reports about the Church in Kerala are given.
A Source of Hope: The Catholic World Report,Feb.2010.
"At the end of 2007,India's Catholic population ranked 16th in the world...India has more seminarians(14,120) than any other nation. Between 1999 and 2007, the number of Indian seminarians increased by an astounding 40 percent.Nearly 64 of India's seminarians will be ordained for religious orders...
"Between 1999 and 2007, the number of diocesan priests ministering in India rose by 24 percent, from 10690 to 13,290, while the number of religious order priests rose by 33 percent, from 8248 to 11003.
India has more nuns than any other nation(except Italy) and will soon rank first in the world..
"Institutional presence is also unmatched anywhere in the world.India has 10,240 Catholic elementary schools with more than 3 million students--More than any other nation in the world.India has more than 5000 high schools with over three million students.
There are more Catholic hospitals in India than in all of North America.Indeed , the Church in India has more hospitals(754),medical dispensaries(2504),leprosaria(220) and orphanages(2,327)  than any other nation."
Jeff also writes about the persecution of Christians in India.He notes: "Although India is a secualr nation whose constituion respects religious freedom, five of India's 29 state governments have enacted anti-conversion laws,and some states have turned a blind eye to the persecution of Christians.Anti-Christian persecution in India attracted world wide attention in 2008 when violence in the northeastern state of Orisaa left 90 dead and fifty thousand homeless.
Speaking aboout the Women's relgious orders, Jeff observes that some of the largest women's congregations are in India."Each has more members than the Benedictines,Dominicans, Sisters of Mercy,the School Sisters of Notre Dame, and other well-known women's communities."
"The greatest threats to the dynamism of the Church in India....are Western-style secularism and smaller families."
In another e article called " Nuns World Wide", Jeff speaks about the decline of vocations among women in the Western world and the increase in vocation among women in India."With five of the 10 largest women religious institutes now headquartered in India--where only 1.6 percent of the world's Catholics live--India has become the worldwide center of women's religious ocations.The number of professed women relgious in India grew by 9,398 between 2002 and 2007.While India has neary 50 million fewer Catholics than the United States does, it has over 30,000 more women relgious.
"If St.Louis is sometimes called the "Rome of the West" because of the number of religious who once served there, it would be far truer to call Ernakulam-Angamaly in Kerala the "Rome of the East.'...Although the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church has 200,000 fewer Catholics than the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, it has 30,000 sisters--more than half of them members of the Franciscan Clarist Congreagtion, the Congregation of the Mother of Carmel, and the sisters of the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament."