Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism to become the world's largest single religious denomination, according to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

In an interview with the paper Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, compilier of the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatican yearbook, said "For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us." He said that figures for 2006 showed that Catholics accounted for 17.4 per cent of the world population while Muslims accounted for 19.2 per cent.

Asked for an explanation Monsignor Formenti observed 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". He said the figure for the Muslim global population was derived from data submitted to the United Nations by Muslim countries.

However Christians as a whole, including Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants and Anglicans make up 33 per cent of the world population. Mosnignor Formenti said Latin America remained "the stronghold" of Catholicism, and the American continent as a whole had nearly half the world's total. He noted the decline in numbers of Catholic priests, and said the number of nuns was also suffering a "drastic reduction".

The figures were released as both the Vatican and Muslim leaders sought to pursue a recently initiated Muslim-Catholic dialogue despite tensions over Pope Benedict XVI's high profile baptism at Easter of Magdi Allam, a converted Italian Muslim journalist of Egyptian origin. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said the opinions of Mr Allam, an outspoken critic of Islam as inherently violent and repressive, were not in any way "the official expression of the positions of the Pope or the Holy See".

The Vatican puts the number of Catholics in the world at 1.13 billion people, while the figure for Muslims is estimated at around 1.3 billion.

Rome has Europe's largest mosque, opened in 1995 and paid for by Muslim countries, mainly by Saudi Arabia, which at present bans Christian worship but is reported to be considering allowing the construction of a church on Saudi soil as part of negotiations for the establishment of diplomatic relations.

In a provocative short story entitled "The Last Christmas" (L'Ultimo Natale) the popular Italian writer Valerio Massimo Manfredi imagines a future in which Islam has become the dominant religion in Italy, with the Pope obliged to leave St Peter's and make way for an Imam.

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