The big news tonight

Practically all day today, Drudge was all about the news report (Reuters) that "the Vatican said on Sunday... Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world."  It's been plastered across his homepage in red, the only above-the-fold exposure, as if a doomsday note to mankind.

From the article:

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.

However, Thomas Peters over at American Papist makes an interesting observation that the media completely misses, and is key to properly interpreting this announcement: 

"Islam" should be taken as an umbrella term much like "Christianity." Islam does not have a central authority, and divisions of Islam are many. Islam is primarily divided into Sunnis (~940 million) and Shiites (~170 million).

Thus, It would be more accurate to compare "Islam" with "Christianity" and compare "Catholicism" with, say, the Sunni branch of Islam. In both these cases, Christianity and Catholicism remain more numerous than their respective counterparts.

Notably, he also points out what I think is the key takeaway from this story: the Muslim population is simply having children at rates far greater than those of Christians.  Is the secret to return to God's command to "be fruitful and multiply," to take steps to put an end to our selfish culture of death, and to start to make and raise more Christian babies? 

No related posts.