At the service of the Church in Japan

Japanese bishops met with our Dicastery on 9 April and presented their Conference of Bishops.

The Church in Japan is an absolute minority in the overall population. Some faithful are foreign Catholics mainly from other countries. Thanks to them, there are now 1 million Catholics in the country. This makes Japan an international and multicultural Church.

In many parishes, co-responsibility of the laity was successfully experienced already in the 1990s, thanks to the “Collaborative Ministry for Mission” aiming to promote cooperation between the laity and clerics in the work of evangelization, with a focus on the role of the laity. This anticipated the outcomes of the synodal process that is currently taking place in the Church.

Japanese bishops deeply care about issues regarding human life. Many ecclesiastical movements work together to promote the culture of life, in a context where the population is among the oldest in the world and has a remarkable fall in birth-rate and a high rate of individualism: these are the greatest challenges for Japanese bishops.