VATICAN CITY, 31 March 2008 — Islam has surpassed Roman Catholicism as the world’s largest religion, the Vatican newspaper said yesterday. “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.
“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.
Formenti said that the data refer to 2006. The figures on Muslims had been put together by Muslim countries and then provided to the United Nations, he said, adding that the Vatican could only vouch for its own data.
When considering all Christians and not just Catholics, Christians make up 33 percent of the world population, Formenti said.
The Vatican said also said yesterday that it had made no decisions yet on whether to move Pope John Paul II’s tomb from the grottos underneath St. Peter’s Basilica to the basilica itself.
Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said, “Any decision on the matter would not be made until the beatification.” John Paul died April 2, 2005, after a nearly 27-year pontificate. Shortly afterward, Pope Benedict XVI put him on the fast track for possible sainthood, waiving the customary five-year waiting period. Beatification is the last major step before possible sainthood.
