Four over-arching realities will define relations between Christians and Jews in the coming years.
The first two, demography and geography, are linked. Since the fifth century, Europe and, more recently, North America, have been the centres of Christian population, clerical leadership and religious thought. Today, thanks to rapid population growth in South America, Africa and Asia, most of the world’s Christians reside in the Southern Hemisphere.
This trend is accelerating even as the number of Christians is holding steady or actually declining in Europe and North America, where Christians and Jews are older and fewer in number than their co-religionists in the rest of the world.
Recent figures report that since 2000, the Catholic population grew by 33 per cent in Asia, by 15.6 per cent in Africa, and by 10.9 per cent in Central and South America. The increase in the European Catholic population since 2000 was only one per cent.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI repeatedly expressed concern about the shrinking number of professing Catholics on the European continent. The causes of the decline include the clergy sexual abuse scandals, the “secularisation” of the “First World”, and the decreasing Catholic birth rate in North America and Europe.
This shift will influence both Christianity and Judaism in the 21st century, as the longtime spiritual, intellectual and population cores of Christianity and Judaism lose their dominance and influence. Already, Catholic priests and, importantly, cardinals are increasingly from Asia, the Americas or Africa.
Read the article by A. James Rudin in Sight Magazine.