He is a recent convert to Catholicism.

And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam.

In 2002, the Roman Catholic Church celebrated the centenary of the revival of Catholicism in Central Asia.

Catholicism or, more accurately, the celibate male mythos at the heart of the institutional church rests on centuries of sexism. An antifeminist culture pervades the organization.

Combined, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina account for 26 of the world s Catholics. Yet Latin America s Catholic population appears to be leveling off, due to falling birth rates and conversions out of Catholicism.

Catholicism has had mad popes and bad popes and occasionally good popes. It is used to seeing the world turn upside down for a few days during carnival, and then go back to normal.

The real issue is not a theoretical question about Islam, but concerns the religious practices of Muslims. The forms of religiosity in Islam today are more or less the same as those found in Catholicism, Protestantism, and even Judaism.

I got accused in a few blogs that I was actually sent by the Pope to preach the Trinity and Catholicism in the Middle East, so you you believe who you want. I gave you my version of the story.

Catholicism does not oblige its adherents to run hospitals and universities. (The government already exempts parishes and dioceses, thereby drawing a distinction between institutions that are central to the freedom to practice one s religion and those that are peripheral to it.)

In Poland, for example, the prevailing mix of Catholicism and nationalism made society particularly resistant to communism (certainly in comparison with the egalitarian, social democratic ethos of pre war Czechoslovakia). But these anti communist antibodies also worked against the universal acceptance among Poles of liberal democracy.

GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA Catholicism, among the most tradition bound religions, contains at its core a paradox that has become increasingly sharp. As Pope Francis begins his first overseas trip to Brazil, the world s most populous Catholic country it is difficult, despite the inertia of the past, to tell where the church is headed.

So, this woman, who converted from the Church of England to Catholicism when she married my father and there's no one more rabid than a Catholic convert decided to teach in the rural areas in Nigeria, particularly among Igbo women, the Billings ovulation method, which was the only approved birth control by the Catholic Church.

The larger lesson is that this monarchical model of Catholicism, together with the hierarchy that attends it, has remained pretty much the same since the Counter Reformation. For example, when priests leave holy orders, they are reduced to the lay state a bit of condescending terminology that says a lot about the Church s archaic mindset.

By that fact alone, he added a spiritual dimension to an age which is dominated by worldly concerns, such as wealth and show business. Those of us who believe in a multidimensional culture will be grateful to him for his enormous efforts, thus for his catholicism in the original sense of the word, his all embracing concerns.

The combination of the highest share of Catholics in the world with a decline in the share of religious adherents leaves Francis facing a strategic dilemma. Either he can focus on regaining Latin America for the Catholic Church, or he can place longer term bets on Sub Saharan Africa, where both the population and Catholicism are now growing faster than anywhere else in the world.

Catholicism in its heyday combined a fairly decentralized administration, under the sway of stand alone bishops, with a uniform set of beliefs. One reason why it used to take roughly 13 years for a Jesuit to reach ordination was the long indoctrination in orthodoxy required for priests who, unlike regular clergy (whose training lasted half that time), would be mobile and beyond the direct control of bishops.

The most obvious implication is that Francis is weary of polarization, and hopes that the dual canonization will help to propel a shift toward a big tent Catholicism that appeals to a broader range of people. Francis is certainly in a strong position to initiate such a shift his political capital is extraordinarily high, surpassing even that of US President Barack Obama in his early days in office.