Interesting analysis. Pretty much every Orthodox Christian population has a negative growth rate - some of this is probably due to Orthodox Christianity’s official acceptance of artificial birth control. And since Orthodoxy has had very little missionary presence outside of Alaska and Japan in the past thousand years, it does not have the Catholic situation where disobedient and infertile Europeans are at least being replaced by devout Africans, Asians and Hispanics.
The rest of the article is also fascinating - this is an excellent column.
Ping
This is a ridiculous statement for an article in a magazine that once purported to be Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church includes many ancient eastern rites in addition to the largest group, the Roman Rite. The bishops of eastern rites are the full equal in authority to the bishops from the Roman Rite.
Archbishop Bustros, speaking from Rome in his capacity as authorized spokesman for the Synod, described the meaning of the official synod conclusions. No other bishops of the synod or ranking Vatican officials have contradicted +Bustros, so it is inaccurate to say he was not speaking in official capacity for the Catholic Church.
“Ave Maria in Chaldean”: only dimly related but I’ll post it anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jPMVZCg5V8
The teaching of the Church on these questions thus remains what it always has: All men are in need of Christ for salvation (even if through innocent ignorance they may be able to be saved without explicit recognition of Christ in this life), the gospel is to be preached to all men (including Jews), and that before the Second Coming there will be a corporate conversion of the Jewish people.As the Catechism says, "The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by ‘all Israel,’ for ‘a hardening has come upon part of Israel’ in their ‘unbelief’ toward Jesus [Rom. 11:20-26]. . . . ‘For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?’ [Rom. 11:15]. The ‘full inclusion’ of the Jews in the Messiah’s salvation, in the wake of ‘the full number of the Gentiles’ will enable the People of God to achieve ‘the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,’ in which ‘God may be all in all’ [Eph. 4:13; 1 Cor. 15:28]" (CCC 674).