FOR the first time Islam is the largest religion in the world, the Vatican has announced. According to the Vatican's newly published statistics Yearbook based on figures for 2006, Muslims now account for 19.2 per cent of the world's population, while Catholics make up 17.4 per cent. Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, who edited the Yearbook, conceded: “For the first time in history we are no longer at the top: the Muslims have overtaken us.” But he put the reason down to birthrate. “While it is known that Muslim families continue to have many children, Christian families are having fewer,” he said in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. The Vatican data showed that Christians as a whole, including Orthodox and Protestant groups as well as Catholics, made up 33 per cent of the world's population. Applying the percentages to the 2006 world population of about 6.5 billion, Muslims would have made up 1.25 billion of the total, Catholics 1.13 billion and all Christians 2.15 billion. Islam is probably the world's fastest growing religion as Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Iran, have some of the fastest growing populations while in Europe and North America new believers are said to be converting to the faith like never before. According to the “Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life” survey published in 2005, “Islam is already the fastest-growing religion in Europe. Driven by immigration and high birthrates, the number of Muslims on the continent has tripled in the last 30 years. Most demographers forecast a similar or even higher rate of growth in the coming decades.” While according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the World Christian Database as of 2007 estimated the six fastest growing religions of the world to firstly be Islam 1.84 per cent, the Baha'i faith 1.7 per cent, Sikhism 1.62 per cent, Jainism 1.57 per cent, Hinduism 1.52 per cent, and Christianity coming last at 1.32 per cent. Again birth-rates were cited as the reason for the growth. That was the global picture portrayed by the Vatican. Recently, a think-tank has calculated that by 2035, there will be about 1.96 million active Muslims in Britain, compared with 1.63 million Church-goer Christians. Figures published in the latest of a series of reports entitled Religious Trends by Christian Research has warned that 4,000 Churches could close by 2020 if congregations continue to shrink at current rates. According to the recent figures from the Church of England, regular Sunday, weekly and monthly attendance each fell by one per cent in 2006. Fewer than a million people attend Church every Sunday. Although at the last count there were only 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain – compared to 41 million Christians – experts have suggested Muslims are more likely to practice their faith. More than half of the Muslims who responded to the 2001 census said they prayed every day, compared to 6.3 per cent of Christians who attend Church services every week. A Church of England spokesman said: “These sorts of statistics, based on dubious presumptions, do no one of any faiths any favours. Faith communities are not in competition and simplistic research like this is misleading and not helpful.” Recently, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales gave a gloomy picture of religious life in the United Kingdom. In a lecture at Westminster Cathedral on 8 May, 2008, the Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the Archbishop of Westminster, said Britain is becoming a country of “spiritual homelessness” because society makes people afraid to express their faith. Many people want to live by shared values and find a meaning for their existence, but modern society sends out the message that to believe in God is to take a step backwards from being independent and mature, reported by Martin Beckford, religious affairs correspondent of Daily Telegraph on 9 May 2008. The Cardinal said: “In Britain today there is considerable spiritual homelessness, at the same time as there is a lot of public interest in religion. Many people have a sense of being in a sort of exile from faith-guided experience. They think that even if they wanted to believe, faith is no longer an option for them. “To some extent this is the effect of the privatization of religion today: religion comes to be treated as a matter of personal need rather than as a truth that makes an unavoidable claim on us. Only a modern person would think that religion is a private matter, something the individual does in his or her solitude. He said, “You cannot banish religion to the church premises and I am unhappy about the various attempts to eliminate the Christian voice from the public forum. “Our life together in Britain cannot be a God-free zone and we must not allow Britain to become a world devoid of religious faith and its powerful contribution to the common good.” He continued: “I detect among many people a sense of loss, not of being in touch with living sources that can nourish them. They want to live by shared values that can sustain our society but do not know where to find them. They want to find a context that can give their lives a deep meaning, but, again, are unable to find it. “There are unspoken aspirations in people's lives that modern culture does not permit them to express… there is a pervasive message that to commit yourself to God through a religious faith is to take a step back from being independent and mature.” __
