eni reported today that Four out of 10 children in Germany don't know meaning of Christmas

Almost four out of 10 children in Germany do not know the Christmas story, a survey carried out by a German market research company has found.

The poll of 733 children aged between 6 and 12 found six per cent were unable to give any answer at all when asked why Christmas was celebrated, and 15 per cent had a vague notion that Christmas "had to do with Jesus".

Another 18 per cent gave answers such as "because it is winter", "because the shops want to make more money", "because Santa Claus died on that day", or "because Grandma visits".

But the majority - 61 per cent - knew that Christmas was linked to the birth of Christ.

"This mirrors our society," said Michael Kuehn, a Roman Catholic priest and head of the department for children's pastoral care of the German (Roman Catholic) Bishops' Conference (DBK).

"One third of the population are members of the Protestant Church, one third of the Roman Catholic Church and one third are members of other religions or without any church affiliation,"

Kuehn told ENI.

Judy Redman wrote:

Like Allan and Andrew A, I am interested in what has been done with these figures.Quote:Bible believing Christians account for 3.2% of the population in Germany with lower percentages in Spain (0.8) France (0.6) Austria (0.5) and Belgium (0.3). andI must point out that I have a large number of good Christian friends in Europe, especially the UK and even a few in Germany. Remember, given that the EU nations comprise 450 million people, 2% is still a lot of people, about 9 million to be precise, but that is less than the number of Christians in tiny Australia.The author here is comparing apples with pears. My brother works for Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ (WEC) in Spain and this 0.8% is the figure he quotes for "Christians" whilst dismissing all the signficant majority of the Spanish population who are Catholic as not Christian. While I'm happy to recognise that some Catholics don't actually practise the faith they put down on the census, I'm sure this doesn't apply to all of them. I am surprised, however, that this author then suggests that there are more than 9 million Christians in 'tiny Australia'. Quite clearly he is using a different set of criteria to count Christians when he makes this comment, because most churches use a working figure of around 20% of the Australian population as attending worship at least monthly (I imagine Bible-believing Christians attend church at least once a month), so if there are more than 9 million Bible believing Christians in Australia and you define 'Bible believing' as attending church once a month or more often, Australia would need to have a population of over 45 million.And in partial answer to Andrew R's question, according to http://www.geographyiq.com/countries/sp/Spain_people.htm, 99% of Spain's population is Catholic and 1% is 'other', which lines up with the theory that 0.8% Bible believing Christians excludes Catholics. Their figures for Australia say Anglican 26.1%, Roman Catholic 26%, other Christian 24.3%, non-Christian 11%, with our population given as 19,357,594 so to have more than 9 million Christians, the author of the article is likely to be including Anglicans and other Christians as 'Bible believing' when a significant proportion of these people aren't actively involved in a Christian community.Judy-- "All it takes for evil to win is for good, decent folk to do nothing" - Fay White, paraphrasing Edmund Burke

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