Cardinal sees possible “favoured channel” in dialogue with Islam
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, has made statements in the past that made him sound quite sceptical about the value of a theological dialogue with Muslims.
That wasn’t what I found when I interviewed him last Saturday at his office on Via della Conciliazione, just down the road from St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject was the Catholic-Muslim Forum he had just hosted on Nov 4-6 between a Muslim delegation from the Common Word group and Catholic delegation of Vatican officials, Catholic Islam scholars and bishops from western and Muslim countries.
The Common Word group, he said, could become a “favoured channel” for Vatican contacts with Muslims, even while it retains other channels of dialogue. While he still had some reservations about the group’s approach because of differences he sees in ways of reading scriptures, he was quite positive about the actual dialogue itself. “In discussing the love of God, we were doing theology unintentionally,” he said. That jibed with a point that Muslim delegates made during the session itself. “I thought they didn’t want to discuss theology but we’ve been doing that from the start,” University of Cambridge Islamic studies lecturer Tim Winter remarked halfway though the conference.
The cardinal said he felt the most important part of the final communique was item number 5: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” The public part is the key, since that could help Christian minorities in Muslim countries. It could also help Muslim minorities in western countries, which is why Muslim delegation head Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric persuaded the doubters in his ranks to accept it. Several Muslim delegates told me they most appreciated the next item, which reads: “Religious minorities are entitled to be respected in their own religious convictions and practices. They are also entitled to their own places of worship, and their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule.” Tauran had more to say about this in the interview.
Tauran also said there were now too many different Christian-Muslim dialogues and he saw a risk that they could start tripping over each other. Here’s my news story on the interview.
Edited Q&A of Tauran interview: Due to some software glitches, you need to do the following to get to the second page of this post — click on the headline, then click on the page number “2″ below. Page 2 includes Tauran’s closing remarks at the end of the conference.
Ex-diplomat Cardinal Tauran pulls no punches now
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran has apparently left diplomacy behind in his past life. The cardinal is now the head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, and as such, Pope Benedict’s point man for relations with all non-Christian religions except for Judaism.
From 1975 to 2003, Tauran was often a tight-lipped Vatican diplomat. He did his job so well he ended his previous life as Secretary for Relations with States, effectively the Vatican’s foreign minister and number three position in the Secretariat of State.
When he left that job, the Frenchman was briefly Archivist of Holy Roman Church and kept a mostly low profile.
But since September of last year, when he was named to a position in the inter-religious dialogue department, he seems to have undergone a metamorphosis. He has been more outspoken. In the initial response to the “Common Word” dialogue appeal from 138 Muslim scholars, he seemed unusually firm but it wasn’t clear that this might be a trend.
Then in March, in a breakfast meeting with journalists, Tauran did not pull his punches when speaking of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. He said Williams had been “mistaken and naive” for suggesting that some aspects of Sharia law in Britain were unavoidable.
Even though he was indirectly speaking of one area of his expertise — Islam — he was in a certain way “invading” another Vatican department’s turf since relations with Anglicans is the domain of the Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity — headed by German Cardinal Walter Kasper. In fact, Kasper’s department did not find out that Tauran had criticised Williams until his comments were already in the British media.
“That’s just Tauran being Tauran,” one Vatican official commented.
Interfaith talks on agenda in Mecca, Rome and London
There were interesting words on interfaith dialogue from Mecca and Rome today and London yesterday. Efforts to improve contacts and understanding among the main monotheist religions have been gaining steam recently and we’re starting to see some concrete steps. But, as a meeting in Mecca showed, the road ahead could still be quite rocky.
The Mecca meeting, organised by the Saudi-based Muslim World League, is supposed to draw up guidelines for the inter-faith dialogue that Saudi King Abdullah says he wants with Christianity and Islam. “You are meeting here today to say to the world with pride that we are a fair, honest, humanitarian and moral voice, a voice for living together and dialogue,” the monarch said in a high-minded speech.
But former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the few prominent Shi’ites at the conference, rained on his parade with broadsides against the United States and Israel. But he also said: “To have a dialogue with other religions we need to start talking among ourselves. The call needs to be directed at ourselves first of all, and all the sects need to agree on shared points. As a Muslim and a Shi’ite … I say the things we agree on are many.”
That may have been a reaction to a statement this week by a group of independent Saudi clerics saying that Shi’ites, including Lebanese group Hezbollah, were posturing against Israel to hide an anti-Sunni agenda.
On the same day Abdullah spoke, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran said his Vatican department for inter-religious dialogue was drawing up its own guidelines for Catholic dialogue with non-Christian religions. He told Vatican Radio (here in Italian) the guidelines for priests and lay people would be based on the Ten Commandments, which he called “a kind of universal grammar that all believers can use in their relations with God and their neighbour.” This approach neatly links Christians with Jews and Muslims such as the “Common Word” scholars who’ve called for a dialogue based on the principle of love of God and neighbour.
In London, Lambeth Palace issued a statement on Tuesday about an ecumenical meeting that Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams convened on June 1-2 to discuss ways to deepen Christian-Muslim dialogue. More than 40 participants discussed the “Common Word” initiative and “what degree of consensus might be possible as we look forward,” he said. The list of participants shows most of the Christian churches addressed by the “Common Word” letter were present. The statement said: “Delegates at the Consultation were heartened by the great variety of initiatives, some by Muslims and some by Christians, that were taking place at many different levels – many with a well-established track record. A great emphasis was placed on the need to ensure that the results of these encounters were more widely disseminated and influenced the education and formation of young people. The Archbishop agreed to take forward further work, particularly in response to A Common Word.”
There have been several other stories about interfaith dialogue recently, including the following:
Muslim scholar questions Vatican understanding of Islam
The cautious Vatican reaction to the dialogue appeal from 138 Muslim scholars has prompted one of the signatories to question whether the top Catholic official for relations with Muslims understands Islam. More specifically, Aref Ali Nayed has asked how Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran can say that a serious theological dialogue with Muslims is not possible because they will not discuss the Koran in depth. This debate (discussed in an earlier post here) is dense and highly specialised. But it may be at this level that this unprecedented dialogue could take off or fail to ignite.
Nayed, a former professor at the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) in Rome and main spokesman for the 138 scholars, flatly refutes Tauran’s view. He says Muslims have always interpreted the Koran and studied it both historically and linguistically. Their methods were even the forerunners of the “historical-critical” method that Christians use with the Bible, he says. Protestants began applying this “higher criticism” to the Bible in the 18th century and Catholics accepted it only in 1943, making them latecomers to this exercise in Nayed’s view. I am no specialist on these details and will need to hear reactions from Christian theologians.
Readers interested in Nayed’s argument can read it on the website of Islamica magazine or read Cindy Wooden’s story for the Catholic News Service on it. I’ll just quote the crisp conclusion:
“Unfortunately, Cardinal Tauran’s statement turns out to be based on ill-founded ‘Islam versus Christianity’ ‘contrast tables’ developed and advocated by some ‘Islam experts’. Rather than unilaterally declaring the impossibility of theological dialogue with Muslims, Cardinal Tauran would have been wiser to ask Muslim scholars themselves as to what kind of dialogue they feel is possible, from their point of view. To unilaterally pre-determine what is possible and not possible for the other, on behalf of the other, is one sure way of achieving closure in matters dialogical.”
Until we get the Vatican’s official reaction to the Muslim scholars’ letter, we won’t know exactly how it plans to answer this criticism. But comments made by Pope Benedict before and after his election in 2005 strongly hint he has a well-developed view of the difficulty of holding a theological dialogue with Muslims. Fr. Samir Khalil Samir S.J., an Egyptian-born Catholic expert on both faiths who welcomed the dialogue appeal despite some reservations, published this long and detailed analysis of the Pope’s views on Islam in Asianews.it in April 2006.
Joseph Ratzinger is an old-school German professor and they don’t give in lightly. He was so opposed to blurring the differences between faiths that he criticised Pope John Paul’s spectacular Assisi inter-faith summit in 1986. But Pope Benedict found a way to pray with Mustafa Cagrici, the mufti of Istanbul, in the Blue Mosque last year. Are we hearing echoes of Goethe’s Faust (Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust — Two souls dwell, alas! in my breast) or should we look to another poet to explain this?
While we’re on the subject, Benedict and Saudi King Abdullah will meet at the Vatican next Tuesday for the first talks between the head of the Catholic Church and the monarch who is custodian of Islam’s holiest site of Mecca and ruler of a kingdom that follows the strict Wahhabi school of Islam. Benedict has frequently noted the lack of religious reciprocity in some Muslim countries that bar the construction of Christian churches even though Western countries allow mosques to be built on their territory. In Saudi Arabia, non-Muslims are not allowed to visit Mecca. Other religions cannot build houses of worship. Christians can’t even own a Bible. Abdullah’s visit will give Benedict the opportunity to repeat his complaint about the lack of religious freedom to the man whose country is regularly listed — as here by the U.S. State Department– as among the world’s worst offenders.
As a Lutheran, I am concerned that Muslim scholars may assume that the Vatican has some authority over all Christians. The Pope may also make this unfortunate assumption. Even if that’s something THEY can agree on, it is not true.
Vatican says Pope cannot sign collective response to Muslims
A new twist has appeared in the back-and-forth between the Vatican and the Muslim scholars calling for a Christian-Islamic dialogue.
It seems Vatican protocol may partly be responsible for holding up an official Catholic response. “I’m favourable to a quick response to the letter,” said Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, adding the Vatican still had “to study what kind of response to make and with whom”.
Then the head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue explained one of the problems to be solved.
“The Pope cannot respond and sign a collective letter,” he told the French Catholic news service I.Media. He gave no reason why, but Vatican protocal can be baroque and contain strict guidelines about what a pope can and cannot do.
Tauran said he might end up being the Vatican signatory if a collective response is agreed. Several non-Catholic churches have already reacted positively, especially the Anglicans and Lutherans, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said he was consulting his counterparts at the Naples meeting to see if they could respond with one voice.
Discussing the latest letter from Muslim scholars calling his responses to date negative, Tauran told I.Media that the original appeal was “a positive signal, with quotes from the Bible, but some questions remain. When we speak of the love of God, are we speaking about the same love?”
Do readers have an opinion about this? Does the Muslim appeal rate a quick reply? Is the Catholic Church slowing down what other Christian Churches want to make progress on?
The Vatican will act one day to this “Common Word.” In a way, it already has. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says this about Muslims:
The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” – CCC 841
Of course, I know that Muslims deny the Lord Jesus Christ and His atonement for sins by His shed blood on the cross. They deny He is God in flesh, who died and was raised for our justification. Muslims and Catholics do not worship God. Catholics worship a piece of bread (the Eucharist) and Muslims worship the god of this world. The Quran is not holy, not inspired by God. As for this Jesus they adore, they believe he will come back to marry, have children and then die. They also believe this Jesus (Isa or the Antichrist) will come to unite the world’s religions and will form one-world government.
Will Pope Benedict respond to the Muslim dialogue appeal on Sunday?
Will Pope Benedict respond to the dialogue appeal by 138 Muslim scholars this Sunday? After only 10 days? That would be almost breakneck speed. I have to admit I expected the Vatican to take a lot longer in responding to the unprecedented appeal. Even called it “the slow boat in the convoy” among Christians.
But Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, Rome’s main official for dealing with Islam, came out today with a heavy hint that something was expected. In an interview with the French Catholic daily La Croix (here in French), he mentioned that Benedict would be speaking in Naples on Sunday at the opening of the Sant’Egidio community’s interfaith conference “For a World Without Violence.”
“The pope will be there at the start and will certainly say something,” Tauran said, without letting on anything else. A bit thin, but given the way this former Vatican foreign minister weighs his words, that could be a signal.
Tauran’s interview was even more interesting for another signal it sent. The Vatican certainly wants a serious dialogue with Islam, but take a firm stand and not let some divisive issues be swept under the carpet. My story for the Reuters wire says:
The top Vatican official for Islam has praised a novel Muslim call for dialogue but said real theological debate with them was difficult as they saw the Koran as the literal word of God and would not discuss it in depth.
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, in an interview on Friday with the French Catholic daily La Croix, also said Christians would have to discuss curbs on building churches in the Islamic world in the dialogue advocated by 138 Muslim scholars in the appeal.
His interview, coming after mostly positive comments by other Catholic Islam experts, signaled the world’s largest Christian church wanted a serious dialogue with Muslims that did not avoid some fundamental issues dividing the religions.
Read the full story here .
Tauran’s comments come after basically positive assessments by an influential Catholic Islam expert Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, S.J. and by Cardinal Angelo Scola.
This is a very smart & courageous Pope. He’s going to be very caustious regarding any Muslim outreach. First of all, why are they calling for peace with Christians anyway; they’re the ones murdering and slaughtering Christians and burning churches. Maybe they’re concerned about all the Muslim conversions to Christianity. And of all the Muslims that want to leave Islam but can’t, due to Islam’s apostacy laws.
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