Comparing Apples And Oranges, Or Maybe Olives And Dates

The Vatican has announced that there are now more Muslims than Catholics:

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.

That's all well and good, but it's like saying there are more Muslims than there are United Church of Christists. If you want to compare denomination to denomination, you have to understand that there is no monolithic 'Islam.' A more accurate comparison in terms of numbers would be the number of Catholics to, say, the number of Shi'a. An even better comparison, given the schism between Rome and the Eastern Rite churches, would be the number of Roman Catholics to the number of Twelver Shi'a.

What I'm not sure of here is the whole point of the article, and why the Vatican said what they said even though it's not statistically correct (at least not yet, given birth rates and whatnot). Is it kowtowing to their 'New Muslim Overlords,' an early warning that Christendom is about to be overwhelmed by demographics, or something else?

Reconstruction in progress

I'll be converting to Movable Type 4 in the next few days. Hopefully that'll be the impetus I need to blog more often.

Update 8 MAR 08: Since I haven't upgraded since I originally installed MT2.6(!) back in July of 2003(!!!), I have to upgrade to MT3.3 and thence to MT4.0. Things may go wonky, perhaps seriously so, over the next couple of days. Don't worry; I've backed up the entire site.