Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism to become the world's largest single religious denomination, according to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper....
>>>Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism to become the world's largest single religious denomination, according to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.
As a commentary on the growing numbers of Muslim adherents over Catholics, Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, compilier of the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican yearbook, has said in an interview that for “the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us." According to him, 2006 figures showed that Catholics accounted for 17.4 per cent of the world population while Muslims accounted for 19.2 per cent.
He attributed the quantitative change to the observation that while Muslim families continue to make a lot of children, Christian families in contrast were having fewer and fewer children.
However Christians as a whole, including Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and Anglicans still make up 33 per cent of the world population with Latin America remaining as "the stronghold" of Catholicism.
