On October 18, 2026, the Church celebrates the centenary of World Mission Sunday (Domund). In 1926, Pope Pius XI established the day, at the proposal of the Pontifical Mission Societies, so that the entire Church would assume responsibility for supporting evangelization in mission territories.
Its remote origin dates back to Blessed Pauline Jaricot and the Society for the Propagation of the Faith founded in Lyon in 1822. A century later, the motto chosen by Leo XIV, “One in Christ, united in mission”, invites real unity precisely when the figures show a map of Christianity radically different from that of 1926.
According to data from the Pontifical Mission Societies, in one hundred years the number of dioceses in mission territories has quadrupled; Catholics in those jurisdictions have risen from 9.6 million to nearly 347 million; some 9,000 new Catholics have been baptized each day and one parish and three schools have been built daily. The offerings of World Mission Sunday today support more than 1,130 ecclesiastical jurisdictions dependent on the Dicastery for Evangelization. Leo XIV himself, who served as a missionary in Peru, has recalled that those prayers and donations bore fruit in his own life.
However, the global panorama of Christianity, according to the report Status of Global Christianity 2026, published on the site worldchristiandatabase.org, requires these data to be qualified in relation to other religions and Christian traditions. In 2026, Christians number approximately 2.674 billion (32.2 % of the world’s population). Of these, Catholics number around 1.279 billion, the largest tradition, followed by Pentecostals-Charismatics (676 million), Protestants (638 million), Evangelicals (424 million) and Orthodox (293 million). 69 % of Christians live in developing and Third World countries, the so-called nations of the Global South. Muslims reach 2.105 billion and are growing at a faster rate (1.57 % annually compared with 0.95 % for Christians).
The projections for 2075 are interesting and striking. The world population would approach 10.250 billion. Christians would reach about 3.676 billion (35.9 %), while Muslims would stand at around 3.423 billion. Within Christianity, Catholics would grow to approximately 1.517 billion, a rate (0.56 % annually) clearly lower than that of Pentecostals-Charismatics (around 1.138 billion) and Evangelicals. The Global South would concentrate 82 % of Christians.
In terms of resources, donations to Christian causes have risen from 8 billion dollars in 1900 to 1.081 trillion in 2026, with a projection of 1.6 trillion in 2075. Nevertheless, the same study estimates around 70 billion dollars annually lost to “ecclesiastical crimes” within the churches, including fraud, diversion of funds, embezzlement or theft of assets.
In addition, a very high proportion of global generosity remains concentrated in the North, while the young Churches of the South, which already represent the majority of the faithful and of vocations, depend to a large extent on transfers from the wealthy Christian nations. World Mission Sunday channels an important fraction of that solidarity, but it cannot hide the structural asymmetry and, in this too, there is a debt, that of transparency, particularly in Mexico when the faithful do not know the results of the annual collections for World Mission Sunday in each parish and diocese.
The centenary calls for a critical reading. While Africa and parts of Asia produce martyrs, vocations and growth, Europe and North America register continuous declines. Catholicism maintains numerical primacy within Christianity, but is losing ground to faster-growing Pentecostal and Charismatic movements and to Islam.
World Mission Sunday has been, for a century, an effective instrument of solidarity. The 2026 data and the projections to 2075 show that the task is not finished and the proclamation of the Gospel remains valid. Domund 100 is the demand to render an account of what it really means to be “one in Christ, united in mission” when the center of gravity is no longer where it was for centuries and Catholicism faces particular challenges that continue to shape it.