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(Eugene van Deutekom inspects statues stored in the basement of the Museum for Religious Art in Uden, Netherlands, 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan)

When Christianity fades, it doesn’t just leave empty pews behind. With each church that shuts, the statues, crucifixes, chalices, paintings or vestments that were part of regular Sunday services suddenly have no liturgical home.

In the Netherlands, where faith has faded more dramatically than in many other parts of Europe, two churches close down on average every week. The sacred art left over is piling up in cellars and storerooms around the country.

(St John Vianney Catholic church in Eindhoven, which has been closed and is being transformed into a health centre. Since the hall is so large and expensive to heat in winter, the exercise rooms are being built in this modern structure inside it. 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan

Some congregations elsewhere have the opposite problem. New Catholic and Protestant churches are springing up in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and pastors in eastern Europe are seeking to refurbish churches used for decades as warehouses or factories.

A pioneering network of Dutch religious art experts, concerned by the accumulation of objects with both artistic and spiritual significance, has been struggling to match some of their supply to this new demand. Thanks to their work, a Roman Catholic cathedral in the Dominican Republic now boasts a marble altar from a church in Eindhoven that is being turned into a health centre.

(Van Deutekom inspects one of many rows of shelves with surplus statues in the basement of the Museum for Religious Art in Uden, Netherlands, 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan)

Another Catholic church slated to become a municipal library and theatre has donated pews, statues and crucifixes to a church in Lviv, Ukraine, that was used as a gas mask factory during the communist era. A Dutch Reformed church has donated a silver communion set to a Protestant parish in Romania.

“If we have something we can’t use, there is nothing better than to know it is being used in another church,” said Rev Martien Mesch, who has sent truckloads of surplus items to Ukraine from two Catholic churches he had to close down in the town of Vught, near the southern Dutch city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch.

(A statue, parts of a neo-Gothic altar, candle holders and other church objects stored in a garage at the Catholic diocese headquarters in 's-Hertogenbosch, 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan)

Eugene van Deutekom, diocesan archivist and historian for the Catholic diocese headquartered in this southern Dutch city, said surplus objects should be transferred if possible to churches still in use and valuable ones donated to museums in the Netherlands.

But if there is no place for them at home, the experts help closing churches donate this heritage to the growing number of churches abroad who have asked for everything from fine gold and silver vessels to heavy wooden pew benches.

(Van Deutekom shows old Mass vestments out of fashion in western churches but still in demand abroad, especially in the Baltic states. A surplus gold chalice and silver ciboria are on the shelf at the diocese headquarters in 's-Hertogenbosch. 20 March 2012/Tom Heneghan)

“We give parishes a way to find a good second life for sacred objects,” van Deutekom explained. “If an object was made to be used in the liturgy, I want to keep it in the liturgy.”

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(Our Lady of the Rosary Roman Catholic church in Doha, the first Christian church built in Qatar, before the first Mass celebrated there on March 15, 2008. REUTERS/Fadi Al-Assaad )

Turkey’s top Muslim cleric has stepped into an international row over Christianity on the Arabian Peninsula, rejecting comments attributed to the Saudi grand mufti that all churches there should be destroyed.

Mehmet Görmez, head of the Religious Affairs Directorate in Ankara, told a Turkish newspaper that Islam respected the rights of other faiths and calls for the destruction of churches went against centuries of tolerance.

Reports that Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh had issued a fatwa, or religious order, against churches last month prompted protests from Christian bishops in Austria, Germany and Russia and provoked a storm on Christian websites around the world.

Gormez, in an interview published by Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman on Friday, said: “The mentioned opinion is evidently against the aims of Islam (and) against the Muslim tradition’s established practice of respecting non-Muslims’ rights as well.”

“We strongly believe that this declaration has left dark shadows upon the concept of rights and freedoms in Islam that have always been observed,” he added.

Saudi Arabia does not allow churches on its territory, citing a saying of the Prophet Mohammad that there cannot be two religions on the Arabian Peninsula. But neighbouring Gulf states have long had churches and some allow new ones to be built.

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(Packaged halal turkey and beef salami at the Paris Halal Expo fair, 3 April 2012/Tom Heneghan)

Some French politicians have seized on the spread of halal food to win votes. Producers selling their wares at Paris’s annual Muslim food fair are much more sure it will bring something else: profit.

(Halal ravioli at Paris Halal Expo, 3 April 2012/Tom Heneghan)

France’s halal market, now estimated at 5.5 billion euros with about 10 percent annual growth, became a political issue in recent weeks as President Nicolas Sarkozy used it in an unabashed pitch for votes from the anti-immigrant far-right.

The raw facts about halal butchering became a top issue on the election campaign trail, to the point that Sarkozy’s prime minister, Francois Fillon, said halal and kosher slaughter were outdated “ancestral traditions” that should be scrapped.

That hit a raw nerve in France’s Muslim and Jewish communities – both the largest of their kind in Europe – whose leaders complained openly. The issue has since mostly faded from the campaign for the two-round presidential election, which ends on May 6.

(Belgian alcohol-free champagne at Paris Halal Expo, 3 April 2012/Tom Heneghan)

“It was a lot of noise for nothing,” said Aissa Osmane, who sells sharia-compliant spaghetti sauces with halal beef in the bolognese and smoked poultry cubes for bacon in the carbonara.

The halal market can only grow as the 5-million strong Muslim community further integrates into French life, said the businessman from the Paris suburb of Villetaneuse.

“Muslims live in today’s world like everybody else, they’re busy and want ready-made foods,” he said at the Paris Halal Expo fair, open on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.

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(Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi reads during a mass prayer during a celebration to mark the birthday of Prophet Mohammed in Agadez March 30, 2007. REUTERS/Samuel De Jaegere)

On a tidy campus in his capital of Tripoli, dictator Muammar Gaddafi sponsored one of the world’s leading Muslim missionary networks. It was the smiling face of his Libyan regime, and the world smiled back.

The World Islamic Call Society (WICS) sent staffers out to build mosques and provide humanitarian relief. It gave poor students a free university education, in religion, finance and computer science. Its missionaries traversed Africa preaching a moderate, Sufi-tinged version of Islam as an alternative to the strict Wahhabism that Saudi Arabia was spreading.

The Society won approval in high places. The Vatican counted it among its partners in Christian-Muslim dialogue and both Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict received its secretary general. Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual head of the world’s Anglicans, visited the campus in 2009 to deliver a lecture. The following year, the U.S. State Department noted approvingly how the Society had helped Filipino Christian migrant workers start a church in Libya.

But the Society had a darker side that occasionally flashed into view. In Africa, rumors abounded for years of Society staffers paying off local politicians or supporting insurgent groups. In 2004, an American Muslim leader was convicted of a plot to assassinate the Saudi crown prince, financed in part by the Society. In 2011, Canada stripped the local Society office of its charity status after it found the director had diverted Society money to a radical group that had attempted a coup in Trinidad and Tobago in 1990 and was linked to a plot to bomb New York’s Kennedy Airport in 2007.

Now, with the Gaddafi regime gone, it is possible to piece together a fuller picture of this two-faced group. Interviews with three dozen current and former Society staff and Libyan officials, religious leaders and exiles, as well as analysis of its relations with the West, show how this arm of the Gaddafi regime was able to sustain a decades-long double game.

Yet Libya’s new leaders, the same ones who fought bitterly to overthrow Gaddafi and dismantle his 42-year dictatorship, are unanimous in wanting to preserve the WICS. They say they can disentangle its religious work from the dirty tricks it played and retain the Society as a legitimate religious charity – and an instrument of soft power for oil-rich Libya.

Read the full story here.  For a full PDF version with pix and graphics, click here.
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(Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Asheikh, the Kingdom's grand mufti, prays at the Grand Mosque in Riyadh February 6, 2008. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji)

Christian bishops in Germany, Austria and Russia have sharply criticized Saudi Arabia’s top religious official after reports that he issued a fatwa saying all churches on the Arabian Peninsula should be destroyed.

In separate statements on Friday, the Roman Catholic bishops in Germany and Austria slammed the ruling by Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Shaikh as an unacceptable denial of human rights to millions of foreign workers in the Gulf region.

Archbishop Mark of Yegoryevsk, head of the Russian Orthodox department for churches abroad, called the fatwa “alarming” in a statement on Tuesday. Such blunt criticism from mainstream Christian leaders of their Muslim counterparts is very rare.

Christian websites have reported Sheikh Abdulaziz, one of the most influential religious leaders in the Muslim world, issued the fatwa last week in response to a Kuwaiti lawmaker who asked if Kuwait could ban church construction in Kuwait.

Citing Arab-language media reports, they say the sheikh ruled that further church building should be banned and existing Christian houses of worship should be destroyed.

Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, chairman of the German Bishops Conference, said the mufti “shows no respect for the religious freedom and free co-existence of religions”, especially all the foreign laborers who made its economy work.

“It would be a slap in the face to these people if the few churches available to them were to be taken away,” he said.

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(A Polish pub in Edinburgh, Scotland, May 22, 2008 REUTERS/Quentin Webb)

Christians far outnumber Muslims as migrants around the world, including in the European Union where debates about immigration usually focus on new Muslim arrivals, according to a new study issued on Thursday.

Of the world’s 214 million people who have moved from their home country to live in another, about 106 million (49 percent) are Christians while around 60 million (27 percent) are Muslims, the study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life said.

Only 3.6 million Jews around the world have moved across international borders, the study said, but that is 25 percent of the world’s Jewish population, by far the highest proportion on the move of any faith group.

“Many experts think that, on the whole, economic opportunities – better jobs and higher wages – have been the single biggest driver of international migration,” it said.

“At the same time, religion remains a factor in some people’s decisions to leave their countries of birth and their choices of where to go.”

The study defined migrants as people living in another country in 2010 for over a year, including estimates of illegal immigrants and long-term refugees including Palestinians and their descendants.

“Perhaps contrary to popular perception, … Christian immigrants outnumber Muslim immigrants in the European Union as a whole,” the report said, indirectly referring to far-right parties that have long campaigned against Muslim newcomers.

Of the 47 million migrants in the EU, 26 million (56 percent) are Christians, double the 13 million Muslim migrants, who make up only 27 percent of the total, it said.

The gap narrows when intra-EU migration – for example, Christian Greeks to Germany or French-born Muslims to Britain – is excluded, but Christians migrating from outside the EU still outnumber non-EU Muslim migrants by about 13 million to 12 million.

For the study “Faith on the Move,” click here.

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(Kosher butcher shop in Choisy-le-Roi near Paris, 10 April 2011/Djampa)

France’s prime minister urged Muslims and Jews to consider scrapping their halal and kosher slaughter laws on Monday as President Nicolas Sarkozy and his allies stepped up their efforts to woo far-right voters.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon made the suggestion after Sarkozy called at the weekend for butchers to clearly label meat slaughtered according to religious laws and his allies warned immigrants might impose halal meat on French schoolchildren.

Fillon and other conservative leaders linked this tough stand on ritually prepared meat to issues such as immigration and French identity that the far-right National Front uses to tap into resentment against Europe’s largest Muslim minority.

“Religions should think about keeping traditions that don’t have much in common with today’s state of science, technology and health problems,” Fillon told Europe 1 radio while discussing the two-round presidential election ending May 6.

(A Halal butcher shop in Paris during Ramadan August 12, 2010. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen)

The “ancestral traditions” of ritual slaughter were justified for hygienic reasons in the past but were now outdated, he said. “We live in a modern society.”

Mohammad Moussaoui, head of France’s Muslim Council, said ritual slaughter was no more painful than modern methods and labelling meat as being prepared “without stunning” would feed resentment against the two minority religions using it.

“It will stigmatise Muslims and Jews as people who don’t respect the interests of animals,” he said. “That will raise tensions in society.”

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(Fireworks burst over the Eiffel Tower as France celebrates Bastille Day in Paris, July 14, 2004. REUTERS/Stringer)

Paris Mayor Bernard Delanoe has described a Russian Orthodox church to be built along the River Seine as an example of “hodgepodge architecture” not worthy to be on display near the Eiffel Tower. Delanoe said the project – a gleaming white church with five traditional golden domes topped by an wavy glass roof linking it to a nearby Russian spiritual and cultural centre – was “mediocre architecture conceived in haste.”

The project, whose design was chosen in an international architectural competition, was agreed in 2010 by Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Dmitry Medvedev of Russia. Moscow has already purchased a plot of land for it on the left bank of the Seine, just across the river from the tunnel where Britain’s Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997.

“I want to express my very firm opposition to this project conceived by the French and Russian states without the agreement of the city of Paris,” Delanoe said in a statement this week. “I would like UNESCO, the guardian of the banks of the Seine, to get involved so no permission can be given without the endorsement of international experts,” he said.

Paris-based UNESCO, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, has granted world heritage status to the banks of the Seine and the various styles of French architecture adorning them.

Delanoe’s statement on Monday said the project’s “hodgepodge architecture displays an ostentatiousness unsuited to a UNESCO world heritage site, or one within view of the Eiffel Tower.”

A Russian presidential spokesman in Moscow said the Paris mayor could not block the decision made by the French president. “This is his personal opinion … and it has no legal significance,” Viktor Khrekov told RIA-Novosti news agency on Tuesday.

With its 165 million members, the Russian Orthodox Church is the second-largest in Christianity after the 1.3-billion strong Roman Catholic Church. It has been playing an increasingly active role at home and abroad since the end of Soviet communism in 1991.

For images of the planned church and information on the project, click here.

via Paris mayor slams Russian church due near Eiffel Tower | Reuters.

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(Members of parliament attend a session of Tunisia's constitutional assembly in Tunis November 23, 2011. REUTERS/Zoubeir Souissi)

After months of reassuring secularist critics, Islamist politicians in Tunisia and Egypt have begun to lay down markers about how Muslim their states should be — and first signs show they want more religion than previously admitted. Islamist parties swept the first free elections in both countries in recent months after campaigns that stressed their readiness to work with the secularists they struggled with in the Arab Spring revolts against decades-long dictatorships.

With political deadlines looming, a key Tunisian party in the constituent assembly and the head of Egypt’s influential Muslim Brotherhood both made statements this week revealing a stronger emphasis on Islam in government.

Popular List, the party tasked with writing Tunisia’s new constitution, announced on Monday its draft called Islam “the principle source of legislation” – a phrase denoting laws based on the sharia moral and legal code.

On Tuesday, Egyptian Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie said his group wanted a president with “an Islamic background.” That term is vague, but not as vague as the conciliatory “consensus candidate” talk heard from most parties until now.

Secularists in both countries warned voters against trusting the Islamists and these subtle changes could have come straight from a secularist playbook on how Islamists would gradually insert more religion into the political and legal systems.
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* This is an updated version of the original post, correcting the description of the Popular List party.

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