Typically biased reporting on religious life demographics issued by the BBC

The BBC hasn't learned any new tricks:

Newly published statistics showed that the number of men and women belonging to religious orders fell by 10% to just under a million between 2005 and 2006.

During the pontificate of the late Pope John Paul II, the number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by a quarter.

Is it me, or is the second paragraph somehow trying to claim a causal connection between the decline in religious life and John Paul II's conservative reign? If anything, he probably prevented those numbers from falling lower. What we are seeing now and what obtained during his pontificate is the long-term fallout of the 60's and 70's.

The figures were published next to a report of Pope Benedict XVI's meeting with nuns, monks and priests from many countries gathered in St Peter's Basilica in Rome last weekend.

The BBC's David Willey in the Italian capital says the accelerating downward trend must have caused concern to the Pope.

I'm sure this news was no surprise to the pope. I'm sure the reporter knew that such statistics have been around for a good while now, but hey, it must have been a slow news day, right? Of course this is cause for concern, but where is mention of the other significant causes of hope? Oh right, it's not that slow of a news day.

And, just in case we forgot the BBC's pet theory that "JP2 = no nuns", the article ends:

The number of Catholic nuns worldwide declined by about a quarter during the reign of Pope John Paul, and this further drop shows that new recruits are failing to replace those nuns who die, or decide to abandon their vows, he adds.

Got it.

update: well, riddle me this:

Vatican corrects figures showing steep drop in religious orders

Between 2005 and 2006, L'Osservatore Romano reported, the number of male and female religious in the world dropped by nearly 95,000. The entire religious population now stands at just over 945,000.

However, on the day after those figures were published in the Vatican newspaper, the Vatican press office corrected the record. Father Ciro Benedettini, the deputy director of the press office, said that the accurate figures showed a decline of just 7,230 over that one-year period.

Thus although the world's religious population did decrease between 2005 and 2006, the decline was less than 1% of the total-- rather than nearly 10%. - CWN

Commenters below take note - less than 1%, not 10%. Who ran the first set of numbers, I wonder?