Advent 4 C

Image: "For Joy," 
©Jan Richardson.

December 20, 2015

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The gospel today begins with a journey.

“Mary set out and traveled to the hill country in haste…”

This time of year, I think, a lot of us can appreciate the idea of taking a trip. Millions of Americans take holiday vacations.

But what Mary does here is hardly a vacation.

She has just been told that she is to be the Mother of God.

And rather than keeping this news to herself, or wondering how she will cope, she sets out on a journey, to visit her cousin, Elizabeth — and we have this momentous scene that follows, The Visitation.

Not only does Mary take this journey to a town of Judah but, with this event, the great journey of her LIFE begins – an adventure that will not end until her final journey, to heaven, on the feast we celebrate today, the Assumption.

We tend to think of the Blessed Mother as a quiet, serene figure – a woman of few words, but blessed with tremendous faith, and boundless trust.

This is true.

But this morning, I’d like to ask you to think of her a little differently.

Think of her also as a woman of action.

She is a woman on a continual journey — constantly, by necessity, on the move. She is restless, rarely sitting still or staying in one place.

After this journey to see Elizabeth, we next find Mary embarking on an arduous trip, while pregnant, to Bethlehem.

After giving birth, she and her small family are on the move again, fleeing to Egypt, to escape death.

We meet her again, traveling to Jerusalem, where her son goes missing – and we follow her as she goes in search of him.

Finding him, she continues her travels, bringing him home to Nazareth.

Mary, as the first disciple, in many ways prefigures all the disciples who will follow – those who traveled, mostly on foot, throughout the world to spread the gospel and proclaim the good news.

Like those apostles, Mary was a missionary – the first missionary, a woman who traveled and carried Christ to the world.

In today’s gospel, we see her, literally, bringing Jesus to another, as she carries him in her womb and goes to her cousin and speaks the words any missionary might pronounce – words which are the very essence of The Good News, and the beginning of all belief:

“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.”

What follows, the Magnificat, is Mary’s great gift to scripture, one of its most beautiful prayers.

 It is prayed every evening in the Liturgy of the Hours by millions around the world. With that, Mary’s great acclamation becomes the Church’s.

We can only imagine what other travels she took in the course of her life … but we can’t forget one in particular, the most difficult of all, as she followed her son on HIS journey to Calvary…

…Her life is closely entwined with ours.

All of us, like Mary, are on a journey.

All of us are traveling to places we may not understand, to destinations we cannot see.

This is life.

But we ask Mary to help guide us on our way.

The road is long. The journey isn’t easy.

We pray to have the trust in God that we need to travel whatever road we must take – just as Mary did.

And we pray, too, that one day our journeying will lead us to meet her face to face – in that place prepared for her, that destination that became her home, and where she waits for us, with a mother’s love and a mother’s hope.

Third Sunday of Advent C

December 2015

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Sisters and brothers: rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again, rejoice.”

St. Paul commands this in the second reading

The word for rejoice in Latin is gaudete, so quite naturally this Sunday is called Gaudete Sunday.

Why all this exultation? Are we finally getting a break from the somberness of Advent?

Yes, but there is more to it than that.

Remember that Advent is like a retreat that the worldwide Church is making.

In this upcoming third week we will consider our lives in the context of the great beauty God has put in us and around us.

Can you think this way?

One line in the First Reading puts it in dramatic terms.

Zephaniah says that the Lord “will sing joyfully because of you, as one sings at festivals.”

Because of you!

Have you ever in your life thought that God might be singing because of you?

Have you ever let your image of God expand that far?

 Have you ever let him, in the most profound sense of the word, be one who sings you into existence?

In one of the books of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, the children are taken back to the very moment of creation.

They hear the voice of Aslan (the Christ figure) singing into the wilderness.

When the voice goes high, birds, clouds, blue sky appear.

At a certain lengthy turn of melody the mountains laboriously raise their heads.

A low hum vibrates forth the depths of seas.

Creation seems to be made out of melody.

Maybe it is.

Scientists still contend about it, however.

What is the physical universe composed of, particles or waves? (I think that is the choice.)

Einstein and many others tried to reconcile them, but no luck.

If I could come even close to describing “string theory,” we might have a third contention about the universe’s makeup.

Maybe you have seen TV shows about string theory on PBS or elsewhere, a model that some scholars actually do believe unites the two hypotheses.

These strings act a lot like sound does.

Like the vibrations that come forth from a violin string.

Instead of saying that particles or waves or uncertainty or whatever else are the basis of matter and force-fields and so on, these scientists instead postulate string-like particles—infinitesimal, ever changing, wriggling. By their dancing shapes these string circles generate (or constitute, or become, or whatever is the right way to say it) everything that is.

How about this for a possibility:

God’s gladness sings out joyfully at every instant,

and his song is the earth, the galaxies, the people and plants and chemicals and soaring hawks and encircling planets, droplets of dew and heavy black holes, youthful beauties, ancient wisdoms, and everything else that exists.

We are God’s song

Apply this, please, to Sunday’s Gospel.

People in long rows gather to be baptized in expectation of the Savior who is to come.

Each segment (the crowd, the tax collectors, the soldiers) ask John the Baptist the exact same question: “Teacher, what should we do?”

“Let your life sing,” he answers.

Let it sing.

Let your life be what it is: God’s joyous, interleaved and always consonant melody, sounding outwards in deepest joy.

Share your cloak and your food, collect only what is owed, do not extort, do these things and you will be sounding the true melody of your of your life.

Second Sunday of Advent C

Image: "Prepare," 
©Jan Richardson.

December 6, 2015

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Our minds have a mind of their own.

Thoughts think themselves, seemingly undirected by the thinker.

The discovery of this simple and undeniable facet of our makeup can be quite startling.

We fantasize we are in complete control of mental processes.

However, the actual situation seems to be quite different.

When we concentrate, we can focus thinking along a certain path.

But if we relax attention, certain automatic mental processes kick in.

The automatic process that concerns John the Baptist is how we deal with the wounds that have been inflicted on us and the wounds we have inflicted on others.

In religious language, his focus is on how the mind seduces us into identifying with sin.

There is an adhesive quality about sinful experiences. They stick.

We remember the beatings, the humiliations, the hateful glances, and the mocking words.

The wrongs done to us are available to memory in a way neutral and even positive experiences are not.

Although the experience of sin begins with being sinned against, we are quick learners in this way of being human.

We soon learn to wound others.

We engage in hitting, lying, cheating, betraying, etc.

We need to protect and promote ourselves at all costs.

Any behavior that appears to further this narrow and intense self-preoccupation we embrace.

Soon we can tell our life story in term of blows received and blows given.

It is a tale of sin; and even if we repress it, it secretly shapes our sense of who we are.

This attraction of the mind to the negative has a cumulative effect.

As the mind simultaneously nurtures a sense of victimhood and wallows in guilt over its own mistakes, sin rises to a new status in the interior life. We gradually begin to identity with the sinful dimension of our lives.

In our own eyes, we become, above all else, one who has been sinned against and one who sins in turn.

We are the receiver and giver of blows, and the highest compliment is, "He gave as good as he got."

The mind is convinced this is the "real us," and it defends this identity by citing facts and providing rationalizations.

Nothing can disprove this obvious truth.

However, there is an important distinction to be made in telling this inner story of sin.

The distinction is between what has happened and what the mind does with what has happened.

We really have been maltreated, victims of the wrongdoing of others; and we really have maltreated others, making them victims of our wrongdoing.

Not to acknowledge this active participation in the sin of the world is to be either incredibly dense or in chronic denial.

But the point is not the sheer factuality of moral evil. The point is what the mind does with these experiences.

It enthrones them as the secret and irreversible truth about the human person.

Sinner becomes the depth identity, the loudest interior noise that blocks out any refuting voices.

The result is an ever-deepening connection of who we are with the wrongs done to us and by us.

Our identification with sin becomes a serious roadblock—a mountain in the way, a winding and rough path that means slow travel, a valley that delays arrival.

 Jesus cannot get to us with his radical address that we are the light of the world, the salt of the earth.

When we cling to our identity as sinner, his words cannot penetrate the armor of our hardened self-evaluation.

He is not the One Who Is to Come, but the One Sin Keeps Away.

That is why John the Baptist is needed as preparation for Christ.

He enables people to go beyond the mind and let go of sins.

This repentance that leads to the forgiveness of sins is a subtle process, but it is not an impossible one.

Two key insights often help us.

The first insight involves our awareness of the nature of the mind.

When we become aware of the powerful tendency of the mind to hold onto sin, we are already beyond it.

We see what it is doing, and so we are more than it.

We transcend the mind by noticing how it works.

When this happens, a sense of spaciousness replaces the sense of restriction and a sense of freedom replaces the sense of compulsion.

We feel we have walked through a door into a hidden room that feels like home.

We are closer to who we really are.

The second insight involves an implication of the basic Christian conviction of the unconditional forgiveness of God.

God is ultimate reality and, therefore, if God holds the sin, the sin transcends the flow of time and remains permanently present.

But if God has let go of the sin, then who is holding on?

The forgiveness of God clears the way for us to see where the real action is.

The real action is the mind and how it clings to negative evaluations. The question changes from "Will God forgive me?" to "How can I go beyond the mind that clings to sin, even though God has forgiven me?"

Before we can hear the words that Jesus heard, “you are my beloved child, in you I am well pleased,” we will have to undergo John’s baptism which entails a repentance that leads to the forgiveness of sins.

If we do this, the path is cleared.

First Sunday of Advent C

Image: "Drawing Near," 
©Jan Richardson.

November 29, 2015

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Why do we have Advent?

You say, “I don’t know, it always just comes along.” Or, “to prepare for Christmas.”

But Christmas came long ago, and if Christ has already been born, what is this Advent waiting about?

“Have we forgotten about his birthing?”

 I have heard these questions, answers, and others, a number of times.

So let us look at his birth and at our forgetfulness.

Our hearts get drowsy and lazy, tired out by the anxieties of daily life.

Maybe we distract ourselves from troubles by working very hard, or becoming depressed, or becoming fascinated with drink, or sex, or out-of-control emotions, or gambling, or email, or golf, or surfing the web, or pride, or, or, or (name yours).

Whatever it is for you, the very clear message of Advent is, “Settle down for a while.”

Open the door just a crack to let God in.

There is a design to help us do this.

Each week’s First Reading is the carrot: usually positive, a promise of good.

 Then the Gospel hits you with a big stick to wake us up.

Take the encouraging First Reading this Sunday.

It reminds us of the promise God made to his people: rightness and justice will come to the earth.

Security. The day of the Lord will arrive, though long delayed.

Peace in our day.

How rewarding it is to desire such a time.

Too good to be true?

 Just pious thought?

Read the First Reading again later and ask yourself those questions. Spend time with them. Pray to God for help.

The Responsorial Psalm will aid you. It asks God to make known his ways to us, to guide us and teach us.

The Second Reading urges us to put God’s promise of peace into action, even if we are not yet sure what it means.

Love others and be loved.

Ah, and then the Gospel.

It tries to wake us up, especially if the above has not helped.

“But I am perfectly awake,” you say.

Alright then, go ahead and read the Gospel again later

.

Signs in the sun, moon and stars, nations in dismay, the roaring of the sea and the waves, people dying of fright, and the Son of Man appearing in the clouds with power and great glory!

Terrifying.

So are you all ready for it?

 Let yourself imagine what such a time might be like.

Picture it scene by scene and don’t worry about being exact. Just experience it.

Will such a shakeup really happen literally?

We do not know.

Maybe much worse is to come, judging from the state of the world today.

Do you live without fear of terrorists or ISIS, of proliferating nuclear weapons, of horrific climate change, of a crash of the world economy, or of the greed that fills so many hearts to overflowing—in your city, in your state, your world?

If you can say “You are right, I am afraid of these,” then you have a start on the reason for Advent.

Christ has to be born afresh.

 Yes, it worked the last time, but you and I forget so easily.

His birth must happen again, in our liturgy, in our lives, in this Advent, so that his sacrifice will not be in vain.

This is why we have Advent.

The Solemnity Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

November 22, 2015

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Once there was a king named Arthur.
You remember him, the one who thought up the Round Table and had Lancelot as his knight and Guinevere as his wife.

Long before he became king, in fact when he was just an infant in the cradle, a strange thing happened.
The nurse stepped out for a moment and, quick as a wink, Merlin the magician stepped in and then stepped back out …

… taking the boy with him.

This was not a kidnapping.
Merlin was a kindly old magician and his job was to let the boy grow up as a normal—not a spoiled, pampered or “royal”—person.
He was not to be miles above the people and the animals and the tiny, precious specks of beauty in the most surprising places in our lives.
He was to live with us.

Merlin transported Arthur to a bedraggled castle ruled by a third-rate Lord named Sir Ector.
The people were nice enough, and ordinary, and the nooks and crannies of the castle were perfect for a little kid to hide in and the halls for him to run in.
All the servants and even the lords and ladies were his friends.
How could they not be? He was just an ordinary boy, though he would be king one day.
They called him Wart (which in those days rhymed with Art, which is short for Arthur).

Merlin, funny old character, decided to educate Wart in a special way. He changed the boy into various and sundry animals, each for a time.
He turned him into a hawk, for instance—to witness first-hand the world as it appeared in a hawk's eyes.
Or a fish. In fact, especially a fish because Wart then could attend a formal school of fishes and learn from their master.

Now, it seems that Jesus had a few things in common with the Wart.
As a boy Jesus was not called “King” or “your highness” any more than Wart was referred to as “your majesty.”
Jesus was called “Jesus,”** a common name in those days.
He played outside, helped his dad, rolled in the mud, cut his finger, even helped birds to fly.
And his mom was his very most favorite person.

He had a teacher who was even better at teaching than Merlin.
It was the Spirit of God.
It helped him through creeks and cubbyholes of the earth and made him friends with the funny sweet people who lived all around.

Both Wart and Jesus did grow up to be the kings they were meant to be. But they brought new images of a king.
Their love was not just for the noble and the mighty but for everyone. They were lowly.
Jesus was “king” because he understood every minutest texture of everyone’s life and world.

Pilate asked Jesus if he were a king.
He was, specifically, but not in any way Pilate could have imagined.
Smallness was his power.
Persuasion was his scepter, along with an amazing ability to teach.
And so, he was Christ the King.
Oh, I almost forgot. I typed a wrong key when I began writing, and hit a “d” instead of a “g” at the end of the word King.
It came out “Christ the Kind.”

This is who we find waiting for us on this Sunday.

It's time to lose luxury

Instead of seeking out luxury, use your resources to build bonds of solidarity and love.

at follows this essay.
In 2013, Pope Francis banished a bishop who was scandalizing the church in Germany because of building a lavish $34 million residence. The German media dubbed him the "luxury bishop.” From the very beginning of his papacy, when he paid his own hotel bill and chose a small car, Francis has walked the Christian walk and impressed many by doing so. He has said in an address to seminarians and novices that it “truly grieves me to see a priest or a nun with the latest model of a car,” asking them to pick a more “humble” one. He concludes: “And if you like the beautiful one, only think of all the children who are dying of hunger. That’s all! Joy is not born from, does not come from things we possess!” The pope is serious about clergy and religious being witnesses to simple living.
But it’s always easier to pick on the sins of others. What about the sin of luxury in our own lives? Hasn’t “too much” become an ordinary, acceptable standard in our own homes and parking lots? The philosophers of the ancient world and the prophets of the Israelites were united in criticizing such displays of excess wealth, and from Plato on, the term “luxury” was applied to this vice. They weren’t against all possessions; they just thought there was a line, an “acquisitive ceiling” (in historian Brad Gregory’s words), beyond which humans shouldn’t go. Luxury meant an inordinate desire for possessions—and as the story of the luxury bishop illustrates, we continue to share a sense that things can go overboard. But don’t we go overboard all the time in our daily lives?
It is true that Jesus’ disturbing commands to leave all possessions behind have never been applied to all Christians. We do not all have to be St. Francis. But on the other hand, we shouldn’t ignore these commands. Glen Stassen and David Gushee suggest Christians try to avoid the problem of luxury by spiritualizing it to death; we tell ourselves we can have possessions, as long as we are “detached” from them. Yet if we are really detached, then we should be able to discern and reject excess as luxury.
But where do we draw the line? In his speech above, Pope Francis joked that someone might respond to him by saying, “So, Father, you are telling us to use a bike?” No, he said, cars are useful for getting certain things done, but that one did not need “fancy” for that. The pope’s example points us to how we name luxury. To discern it in our own lives, we need to ask the question: What are possessions for?
The word “sin” is derived from a Greek word for “missing the mark.” You can only know sin if you know the target at which you’re aiming. Our possessions, according to the Catechism (#2402), have two purposes or targets: to meet the basic needs of our household and to “allow for a natural solidarity” to be built uniting people. We go overboard—and miss the mark—when we use possessions to create and serve false needs in ourselves and to foster rivalries among people. That’s the vice of luxury: We want lots of things we don’t really need, and getting those things incites envy and competition with others. It’s a vice because we become habituated to it; it’s as if we are accustomed to pursuing fancier stuff even when it’s clearly unnecessary and the old stuff works fine.
In the back of our minds, I think we know the truth of these statements. We know keeping up with the Joneses is silly, and we know that stuff won’t ultimately lead to our happiness. Indeed, a lot of studies by social scientists back up our intuitions. Excess stuff and materialistic competition with others don’t make for higher levels of happiness. Yet we seem unable to stop as a society, constantly escalating everything material. And besides, isn’t that new iPhone just…so cool?!
It is cool—magical, even. But here’s where we face a particular problem in today’s world with luxury that the ancient thinkers never imagined. We have a whole industry of marketing dedicated to telling you over and over how “magical” this or that consumer item is. Why? Because we will spend more money if we’re convinced of the magic. One marketing book for makers of high-end products reminds them that they are selling not simply a material thing, but a “feeling,” a “desire to feel special.” Another marketer suggests luxury products correspond to a “dream” and a “quest,” and yet another praises a certain tech company seen by its millions of devotees as not “just a brand” but a “religion.”
From a Catholic perspective, we should recognize the potential magic in material things. We even have a word for it: sacrament. But it’s a very different kind of magic. Beyond the seven sacraments, many Catholic thinkers talk about a “sacramental worldview” in which we are constantly building up the spiritual relationship with God and neighbor through the material world. The most common example? The gift. Gifts—before they became objects of marketing frenzy—were seen as an example of sharing material goods in service of the invisible bonds of social solidarity.
Pope Benedict put this “astonishing experience of gift” at the center of his writings on the Catholic economy. He said we should strive to make all our economic interactions with others have a quota of gift within them. This possibility of gift, of a sharing of excess to build up human relationships, is the real magic latent in our possessions. The marketers of luxury simply want to redirect it; they know material goods aren’t just material goods, but they try to convince us that the magic is about an experience for yourself or an exclusivity that sets you in a special club above others (who don’t or can’t have the luxury).
Thus, we really have a choice. If we are fortunate enough to have excess possessions, will we hit or miss the target? Will we pursue the illusory magic of luxury or will we make of our excess a sacrament for God and for others? It’s not wrong to have possessions or even excess possessions. As I said, not everyone receives the call seen often in the Gospel to leave everything for Jesus. But that doesn’t mean everyone else is off the hook, especially those of us living in the richest country in the history of the world. Instead, we too have a choice.
And that’s a choice many of us face every day. Bishop Robert Barron writes that when you are faced with any purchase, ask yourself: Can I do with less? Or can I do without? Like starting an exercise program, this can be painful at first, but after a while, it’s liberating…especially since it frees up other possibilities for the resources. This is probably the most important point. Instead of luxury, we can use our resources to build bonds of solidarity and love through our purchasing.
For example, buy something handcrafted with real love and skill. Or buy from the farmer who actually cares well for his animals and his land. You pay a bit more, but that’s exactly the quota of gift Benedict talks about. You don’t pay more for some phony magic. You pay more in order to make the purchase a sacramental exchange, an effective sign of God’s grace active in the world and in your life. That’s hitting the target. And if Catholics do this regularly, and do it together, the world will respond to our parishes much the same way it has responded to Francis: By recognizing we are people who actually walk the walk.

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The future map of religions reveals a world of change for Christians, Muslims, and Jews

c. 2015 Religion News Service
(RNS) Muslims will overtake Christians by the end of this century. India, now mostly Hindu, will become the world’s largest Muslim country. The numbers of people with no religious identity will soar in the United States and Europe, but the unaffiliated will lose worldwide market share as Christians maintain a steady growth.
All these changes are drawn from the Pew Research Center’s new  projections, released Thursday (April 2), that map global faith traditions and how they’re likely to shift by 2050. The report says nothing about the transcendent message of any religion. It makes no claims about believers’ level of devotion or practice.
Instead, it’s a story of nitty-gritty statistics: Which group is having babies (lots of babies or just a few)? Which ones have many young people, and which are slowly graying out? Whose followers are on the move—from one nation to another, or switching religions?
“Demographics are an underappreciated force that is shifting the contours of faith,” said Conrad Hackett, the Pew demographer who led the six-year study. Hackett analyzed projected changes for Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, folk religions, other minority religions and the unaffiliated.

Those contours matter. The Pew Research Center doesn’t delve into political forecasting, but readers of the report’s projections from 2010 to 2050 might feel a thumb press down on many sore spots and raise questions beyond the scope of Pew’s data:
* Will prejudice against Muslims rise as the percentage of people in Europe who are Muslim climbs to 10.2 percent, up from today’s 5.9 percent?  “The projected growth rate is only about 1 percentage point a decade,” said Hackett. “But it’s a very visible change: More people wearing veils, more behaving in culturally distinct ways.”
* Who will assume the minority voice in the U.S. public square as Muslims outpace Jews as the country’s third-largest group, after Christians and the unaffiliated?
* Will religious tensions flare as India becomes the world’s most populous Muslim nation, supplanting Indonesia? “The quality of interfaith relations in such a country (about to pass China as the world’s most populous) will be of global importance,” said Alan Cooperman, Pew’s director of religion research.
* How will more secular regions such as Europe and the U.S. relate to deeply religious regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, divided among Christians and Muslims?
“The question is: ‘How will we understand each other?’” said Cooperman. “Sub-Saharan Africa is 12 percent of the world population now, and it will be 20 percent by 2050. That’s huge growth for people to get their heads around.”
The report, sponsored by the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, offers many more head-spinning numbers and a religion-by-religion, region-by-region analysis of data from 198 countries and territories, representing nearly all the world’s population. “No one has done anything like this before, so we had no idea about the big picture,” said Hackett.
Among the major findings:
* “As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third of the Earth’s 6.9 billion people. Islam came in second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the global population.” Four in 10 of all the world’s Christians will live in sub-Saharan Africa by 2050.
* While Christian numbers will continue to grow, Muslims, who are younger and have  a higher birth rate, will outpace them. By 2050, “there will be near parity between Muslims (2.8 billion, or 30 percent of the population) and Christians (2.9 billion, or 31 percent), possibly for the first time in history.” Barring unforeseen events—war, famine, disease, political upheaval and more—Muslim numbers will surpass Christians after 2070.

* Worldwide, the unaffiliated will fall from 16 percent to 13 percent. Christians, Muslims and Hindus live in areas with “bulging youth populations,” high birthrates and falling levels of infant morality, the report said. Even the global tally for Jews is expected to rise, based on the high birthrate of Orthodox Jews in Israel. Meanwhile, the unaffiliated are “heavily concentrated in places with low fertility and aging populations, such as Europe, North America, China and Japan,” the report said.
* Nearly two-thirds of all the unaffiliated worldwide live in China, the research found. “If Chinese authorities allow greater freedom of religion, the share of unaffiliated in the world population could shrink even more dramatically than the report predicts,” said Ariela Keysar, associate director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, who consulted on the project.
* While religious switching has a significant impact in North America and Europe, in many countries, changing one’s religion is difficult — if not illegal. There’s no data on religious switching among China’s 1.3 billion people, with nearly 50 percent of them in the unaffiliated ranks, for example. But in the 70 countries where survey data was available, the report found that Buddhists and Jews are the primary losers on the switch-in/switch-out balance sheet, Hackett said.  “In the USA, there are famous converts like Richard Gere, but there’s a lot of disaffiliation among those who grew up Buddhist.”
* In the U.S., Christians will decline, from more than three-quarters of the population (78.3 percent) in 2010 to two-thirds (66.4 percent) in 2050. Religious “churn”—people leaving their childhood faith for a different faith or none at all—is the primary driver of change.
* The Muslim share of the U.S. population is projected to climb to 2.1 percent, up from less than 1 percent today. Jews will fall from 1.8 percent to 1.4 percent.
* In 2010, there were 159 countries with a Christian majority, but that will fall by eight countries, including France, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.  By 2050, Muslims will hold the majority in 51 countries, up by two from 2010, including Nigeria, which just elected a Muslim president, and the Republic of Macedonia.
“In many ways the value of projects like this is not to say what the world will look like in 2050. The world could change,” said Cooperman. “But they tell us about the world today and the recent path. Peering into the future greatly illuminates what is happening today and its consequences.”

- See more at: http://www.uscatholic.org/news/201504/future-map-religions-reveals-world-change-christians-muslims-and-jews-29969#sthash.KO91tgF5.dpuf