Roman Catholics: 1.13 billionÂ
v.Â
Muslims: 1.3 billionÂ
I have a really big problem with this Reuters story about the above statistics. The Vatican, using hard to verify UN statistics, indicates that the world’s Muslim population has eclipsed Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest religious sect.Â
I’m not concerned about nor am I playing a “my religion’s bigger than yours” game, but I do believe that the premise is ignorant: Islam is not a monolithic religion — it has sects too that we hear about every single day!Â
Ever hear of a “Sunni” or a “Shi’ite”? What about a Sufi, Khariji, Druze or Wahhabi, etc.? They are all sects of Islam, just like Roman Catholicism is a sect (albeit a super-large sect) of Christianity.Â
I’m not sure what the Vatican was trying to say here with this statement about these numbers, but on the surface, it seems either sneaky or ignorant: either a chance to unify other Christian sects to gain numbers, or a politically correct way of starting some kind of a dialogue. But, maybe I’m missing something here.
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“I’m not sure what the Vatican was trying to say here with this statement about these numbers, but on the surface, it seems either sneaky or ignorant: either a chance to unify other Christian sects to gain numbers, or a politically correct way of starting some kind of a dialogue. But, maybe I’m missing something here.”
I am going to go with “missing something here”…
Vatican watchers know that this isn’t the sort of stuff they have press conferences over… But this usually is the sort of comment that gets bandied about and misquoted in the press.
Although if it gets the West to wake up and maybe start having more than one designer child per yuppie marriage, some good may come of it.
But honestly, I don’t see that happening.