by Fr. Patrick Carter, secretary to the abbot primate

The Curia of the Benedictine Confederation often receives calls or emails requesting that we update the information in the OSB Atlas found at osbatlas.com. The OSB Atlas was originally printed in 1973 and has seen several different print and online editions. Unfortunately, the information has never been kept up-to-date and the information in the current online version is obsolete. Updating this information in an ongoing way will constitute a second phase of the new Catalogus platform.

At the same time, the information still stored on the site does provide some interesting statistical graphs that likely depict the current situation of the Benedictine Confederation. The numbers of oblates of monasteries, for instance, have never been included in the Catalogus, but were incorporated into the OSB Atlas. These statistics give us a good estimation of the current number of oblates by continent as shown above in the photo, and by country in the one below. Given that some congregations are required to gather data on their oblates, Abbot Primate Jeremias has asked that we incorporate the number of external oblates into the Catalogus.

One advantage to having a digital platform for the Catalogus will be the easy analysis of the monasteries in the world. Recently, a query was made about the largest monasteries in the 2020 Catalogus, which yielded this result:

We look forward to updating such statistics in a few months with the new information for the 2025 Catalogus.