Mission Impossible
Where there were once some 8,000 Catholic missionaries in the field, there are now just 1,500 stretched across 83 countries and in recent times their numbers have been falling by 100 a year.
Fr Eamon Aylward, acting national director of World Missions Ireland (WMI), goes through the statistics with resignation. In 2008 there were 1,978 priests, sisters, brothers and lay people on the missions from this country — last year there were 1,501, almost all over the age of 50.
