By Thomas A. Shakely
The Vatican said today that Muslims are now more numerous than Catholics in a worldwide report compiled by Monsignor Vittorio Formenti. According to the report, Muslims comprise 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics account for 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.
I think this news should serve as a wake up call to all Catholics, especially those in the United States, that the entire world really is one giant missionary zone. These numbers are not startling if you’ve read Mark Steyn’s “America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It,” but the high birthrates among nearly every Islamic nation versus the anemic birthrates at or below the replacement level of 2.1 per couple in the vast majority of Western nations is both a serious problem and a great opportunity for Catholics.
Our children and grandchildren, though, may grow up in a world dominated by Islam with both radical strains and more moderate strains. We have the opportunity to “make all things new again” in our lives spiritually and in our communities with our witness to Christ and the Good News of the Gospel. Only through a deeper relationship with God through the Mass, through prayer and through everyday witness to Him can we be effective advocates for the Gospel.
We are being called to a new kind of commitment toward Christ and His Eternal Word. Unless we make ourselves new again and make our communities and families more living examples of faith, it will be our grandchildren who face a world entirely unfriendly and unwelcoming to the life of Christ.
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