Muslims surpass Catholics: Will interfaith dialogue follow?
Demographic changes are reshaping the world's religions. The Vatican on Sunday reported that Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world's largest religion.
"For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. Formenti compiles the Vatican's yearbook. He said that Catholics accounted for 17.4 percent of the world population -- a stable percentage -- while Muslims were at 19.2 percent. (Christianity as a whole, however, remains the dominant world religion.)
"It is true that while Muslim families, as is well known, continue to make a lot of children, Christian ones on the contrary tend to have fewer and fewer," the monsignor said.
The news comes as Catholics and Muslims prepare to launch an unprecedented interfaith dialogue. Should the shifting population change the course of dialogue? Do Christians have anything to worry about? How does the rising Muslim population change the way Americans think about Islam and the war on terrorism? Does the changing face of world religion give new impetus to efforts to promote religious tolerance and peace?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment