VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.
Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who compiled the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent.
“For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us,” Formenti told Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano in an interview, saying the data referred to 2006.
He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world’s population — or about 2 billion people.
The Vatican recently put the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people. It did not provide a figure for Muslims, generally estimated at around 1.3 billion.
Formenti said that while the number of Catholics as a proportion of the world’s population was fairly stable, the percentage of Muslims was growing because of higher birth rates.
He said the data on Muslim populations had been compiled by individual countries and then released by the United Nations, adding the Vatican could only vouch for its own statistics.
It is time for Christians to unite and make some babies. Well, not all together of course. I mean as married couples, and such.
March 30, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Y’know, we do need to start doing some breeding. We’ve gotta compensate for all the idiot liberal Euro-Americans who are contracepting their family lines to extinction. The nice thing is, in a wicked twist of Darwinian irony or God’s sense of humor, this anti-humanism doesn’t reproduce.
I’ve told my wife not to expect a lot of turn-around time when she gives birth this summer…outbreed, outlast! (And I’m quite serious.)
March 31, 2008 at 4:04 am
US Catholics give up that cable, forgo the new car once this one is paid for…
And have another baby or three.
The last one you have might be the one that takes care of you when the first two want to put you in the home!