Vatican: Muslims More Numerous Than Catholics
I’m confused. At the end of time, in which we’re living, will we become a Muslim globe before or after we all start worshiping the pope on Sunday?
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday.
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.
He said that if all Christian groups were considered, including Orthodox churches, Anglicans and Protestants, then Christians made up 33 percent of the world’s population — or about 2 billion people.
In light of this news, will a new beast loom in the bump-in-the-night minds of some Adventist evangelists?
Increasingly omni-perspective Samuel Bacchiocchi has already shifted his emphasis, (after September 11, 2001) linking beasts to Islamic terrorists. Of course this is nothing new, as North American Adventists have seen apocalyptic traits in the Turks during WWI and the Axis powers during WWII.
As globalization contributes to the wax and wane of religions, it will be interesting to see how Adventist beast-linking will shift vis-a-vis new perceived Others.
