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Catholic World News News Feature

British Catholics Turning To Islam, Judaism September 04, 2000

LONDON, Sep. 4 (CWNews.com) - A growing number of British Catholics are converting to Islam every year, according to a new study.

Up to 1,000 people a week are switching faiths or denominations, claims "Your God Shall Be My God" by Rabbi Jonathan Romain. "Religious traffic" is "heading in all directions" claims Romain. "People previously used to one faith are now presented with an array of different religious options that were hardly thought of beforehand."

A high proportion of the 2,500 annual converts to Islam every year are Catholics according to Dr. Ahmed Andrews, a lecturer in the sociology of religion at Derby University and himself a convert from Catholicism to Islam. "There are between 5,000 and 10,000 white Muslim converts in this country, and most of the ones I know are former Catholics," he told the Sunday Telegraph. And Romain claims that about a fifth of the 300 to 400 annual coverts to Judaism are Catholics.

Catholicism has also received some high-profile converts in recent years, including the Duchess of Kent and Ann Widdecombe.

Romain says that Britain is a more fertile land for "new religious movements" than the United States and that the Millennium created a further spiritual impetus. "While there has been a decline in knowledge about religion, the spiritual yearning for answers to questions of the meaning of life and personal direction remain," he says. "People feel a spiritual vacuum so they look outside their own religious backgrounds, and there is a lot more on offer."

Peter Brierley, of Christian Research, told The Daily Telegraph that the rate of cross-fertilization appears to have increased. He said: "What we don't know is whether people, having changed, are not changing back again five years later."

A second report published on Monday reveals that older people, traditionally the backbone of parish life, are disappearing from British churches of all denominations.

Researcher Dr. Peter Brierly of Southampton University which conducted the research, told Monday's Guardian newspaper that within 40 years fewer than 0.5 percent of the population will attend services regularly.