The nascent Catholic-Muslim dialogue sparked by the “Common Word” initiative was never going to be easy, even under the best of circumstances. There is a lot of suspicion, misunderstanding and different agendas to deal with. And then there are the surprises that can come seemingly out of nowhere and blow the effort off course, at least temporarily. One of these was the baptism of the Egyptian-born Italian journalist Magdi Allam by Pope Benedict that popped up by surprise on Saturday evening and highlighted some of the twists along the path of inter-faith dialogue.

The most surprising part about Allam’s baptism was not that he converted. He has been living in a traditionally Catholic country for 35 years, is married to a Catholic, is close to the lay Catholic movement Communion and Liberation, has long been highly critical of radical Islam and says he was never an especially pious Muslim. The surprise was that the Vatican would make it such a prominent event. There was a second surprise, too — the fact that Allam published such a hard-hitting declaration about his conversion, his view that Islam is intrinsically violent and that the Catholic Church has been too timid about converting Muslims. We quoted from the Corriere della Sera original on Sunday, but now the Catholic news agency Zenit has provided an English translation.

Reporting from Rome, the Paris daily Le Figaro had an interesting detail. It wrote on Monday that Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and as such the Vatican’s point man for relations with Islam, had not been informed about the Allam baptism before it happened. If this is true, it suggests some behind-the-scenes Vatican politics on how to deal with Muslims. It would seem that Tauran should have been informed on a need-to-know basis — this is, after all, his area of responsibility — but somebody didn’t do it.

We don’t know if the Vatican knew Allam would publish such an outspoken article on Sunday. Several Church sources have said off the record they were surprised and put off by its polemical tone and said it effectively drowned out the weak Vatican efforts to play down the baptism. Whether it was planned or not, Allam’s article became part of the whole story. As will his subsequent comments, as in an interview in today’s Il Giornale.

That was evident in the response that Aref Ali Nayed of the “Common Word” initiative gave to the Allam story on Monday. Nayed, who is director of the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Amman, said he consulted several other signatories of the dialogue appeal before issuing the statement. One of the first things to note is that he treats Allam’s conversion as a personal decision and says “It is God who will judge him.” I didn’t expect “Common Word” signatories to denounce Allam as an apostate deserving death, but it’s worth noting the absence of any such comment because that traditionalist view is the one that’s probably best known to non-Muslims.

That said, Nayed turns to the baptism itself:

As for the Vatican’s deliberate and provocative act of baptising Allam on such a special occasion and in such a spectacular way, it is sufficient to say the following:

1. It is sad that the intimate and personal act of a religious conversion is made into a triumphalist tool for scoring points. Such instrumentalisation of a person and his conversion is contrary to the basic tenets of upholding Human Dignity. It also comes at a most unfortunate time when sincere Muslims and Catholics are working very hard to mend ruptures between the two communities.

2. It is sad that the particular person chosen for such a highly public gesture has a history of generating, and continues to generate, hateful discourse. The basic message of Allam’s most recent article is the very message of the Byzantine emperor quoted by the Pope in his infamous Regensburg lecture. It is not far fetched to see this as another way of re-asserting the message of Regensburg (which the Vatican keeps insisting was not intended). It is now important for the Vatican to distance itself from Allam’s discourse. Should Muslims take the high-profile Papal baptism as a Papal endorsement of Allam’s discourses regarding the nature of Islam (which happen to coincide with the message of Regensburg?

3. It is sad that Benedict XVI chose to make the basic message of his religious discourse during the special occasion of Easter into a quasi-Manichean one with motifs of ‘darkness’ and ‘light’, ‘darkness’ being assigned to the ‘other’ and ‘light’ to the ‘self’. It is also sad that the idea of ‘peace’ expressed in that discourse reduces to the bringing of the ‘other’ into the fold through baptism. Such Roman totalitarian discourse is most unhelpful.

The whole spectacle with its choreography, persona, and messages provokes genuine questions about the motives, intentions, and plans of some of the Pope’s advisers on Islam. Nevertheless, we will not let this unfortunate episode distract us from our work on pursuing “A Common Word” for the sake of humanity and world peace. Our basis for dialogue is not a tit-for-tat logic of ‘reciprocity’, it is rather a compassionate theology of ‘mending the in-between’ for the sake of the Love of God and Love of neighbor.

Some pretty raw nerves on display here (plus an apparent misunderstanding about the Easter Vigil service, at which the motifs of darkness and light are a permanent feature in many Christian churches, not just a choice by Benedict this year to dramatise Allam’s baptism). Another sore point appears at the beginning of his reaction, when Nayed mentions the fact that Allam attended Catholic primary and secondary schools in Cairo before studying in Italy. He adds:

The fact that Allam was given Catholic communion at a very young age under the influence of his early Catholic teachers seems to indicate that he was Christianized in childhood. As a result of his early Catholic schooling, he is reported to have never upheld or practiced the tenets of Islam. The case of Allam reminds us, yet again, of the legitimate concerns of many Muslim scholars regarding the abuse of the trust that sometimes happens when Muslim parents, because of economic or other factors, send their children to Catholic schools. What happens to children, including Muslim ones, in Catholic schools is a matter that must be discussed as part of addressing ‘Human Dignity’ in upcoming discussions. The use of schools for proselytizing is one of the important issues to be discussed.

There are many Christian schools in developing countries, often leftovers from the colonial era, and many Muslim families send their children there because they think they’ll get a better education than in state schools. The late Benazir Bhutto, for example, attended “convent schools” named after Jesus and Mary in both Karachi and the hill station Murree. When I lived in Pakistan, I met several other Muslims who had attended Christian schools and spoke fondly of the nuns who taught them, but never converted. Allam’s example is probably quite rare, but it has clearly pointed to an issue that remains sensitive.

Anyway, if Benedict was placing conversion on the agenda for the first Catholic-Muslim Forum meeting due in November, Nayed here is putting proselytism there too. These issues might be seen as two sides of the same coin called “religious freedom.” Or they might not be. Whether they remain separate agenda points or get joined may be a barometer of how this dialogue progresses.

One last point — all this focus on the Vatican position shouldn’t obscure the fact that “A Common Word” was addressed to all Christian churches and many Protestant churches have been more positive in their responses. When I asked Nayed about this, he said: “We’re preparing for our meeting in Rome in November, but we also have several other meetings in coming months.” In July, “Common Word” representatives will meet at Yale University with theologians from Yale, Harvard and Princeton divinity schools (mostly Protestant, including evangelicals, with a few Jewish scholars as well). A meeting to discuss scripture is planned at the University of Cambridge divinity school in October, then comes Rome in November and Georgetown University in Washington in January (a mixed group to discuss religion and world politics). Sometime in the spring, they plan a meeting on prayer and meditation with Orthodox Christians at the site of Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River.

Just when relations between the Vatican and Muslims were improving, Pope Benedict has taken a highly symbolic step that could set them back again. On Saturday evening, at the Easter Vigil Mass, he baptised seven people including one of Italy’s best-known Muslims. Magdi Allam, the new convert, is deputy director of the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera and an outspoken critic of radical Islam. The Egyptian-born journalist, who has lived in Italy since his university days, was one of the few Muslims who defended the pope after his controversial Regensburg speech in 2006. Allam’s outspoken articles have already prompted death threats from Islamists and he lives under constant guard. Announcing the surprise move only an hour before it took place, the Vatican stressed the Catholic Church had the right to baptise anyone who wanted to join it and that all were equal in the eyes of God.

That is certainly true, but such a high-level conversion can’t be seen outside its wider context. Islam considers conversion to another religion a grave insult to God. In some Muslim states including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan, it is punishable by death. Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity pictured at right during his trial for apostasy, only escaped death in 2006 because of an international outcry; he found refuge in Italy. Not all Muslims agree with this. An Italian Muslim spokesman, for example, stressed that Allam’s conversion was a personal decision and only questioned why Benedict chose to make his baptism such a public event. He could have been baptised in his local church without all the publicity, he said. This high-visibility baptism looks likely to provoke protests from Muslims in some parts of the world and raise questions about Benedict’s intentions.

France 24 television interrupted my Easter lunch en famille to interview me about this and their main question was whether it was a response to Osama bin Laden’s threat against the pope. That assumes a U.S. campaign-style readiness to react that is miles or centuries away from the way the Vatican works. Easter is the traditional time to baptise adult converts. Allam had to go through a long period of study before being accepted for baptism. Benedict had to know about this at least several weeks ago. In his article in Corriere (see below), Allam mentions a meeting with Benedict where he told him of his intention to convert and the pope said he would gladly baptise him. But Allam does not mention the date.

If challenged, the pope would probably first say that both Christianity and Islam are missionary religions for which conversion is legitimate as long as the person makes the choice to change religions freely. What is objectionable, he would argue, is proselytism, i.e. aggressive efforts to win converts (”stealing sheep”, some clerics would say). There are progressive Muslims who will agree with this view intellectually, but probably few would be comfortable with it.

If Benedict were pressed to explain this step further (which is not, by the way, something that we journalists get to do that often!), I think he would say that differences about conversion would be a perfect topic to discuss in the new Catholic-Muslim Forum that was just launched two weeks ago. The experts in this dialogue could explain each faith’s view of religious freedom, personal commitment and divine will. Over the course of several meetings, maybe several years, they might come to a better understanding of the relationship between individual believers and faith communities. Maybe such discussions could even influence leading Muslims to take a broader view of religious freedom, leading to greater liberty for Muslims and for the non-Muslims living in Islamic countries. Seen this way, the question to ask at the next opportunity (when? maybe in the papal plane to the United States on April 15?) is: “Holy Father, did you baptise Allam to put the issue of conversion firmly on the agenda for the Catholic-Muslim Forum talks?”

But a lot of water can flow down the Tiber and the Nile between now and then. No matter how matter-of-factly the Vatican may try to present Allam’s baptism, the new Catholic has pulled no punches in his apologia. In a front-page article in today’s Corriere entitled La Mia Scelta (My Choice), Allam wrote that his mind “has been freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimises lies and deception, violent death that leads to homicide and suicide, blind submission to tyranny, permitting me to join the authentic religion of Truth, Life and Liberty”. He knew this could put him in even more danger, but said: “I realise what I am going up against but I will confront my fate with my head high, with my back straight and the interior strength of one who is certain about his faith.”

The Islamist death threats against him in recent years had led him to ask “about the attitude of those who publicly issued fatwas denouncing me, a Muslim, as an ‘enemy of Islam’ and a hypocrite … a liar and a defamer of Islam, in this way legitimising a death sentence against me. I asked myself how it was possible that someone like me, who was working strenuously and with conviction for a moderate Islam, who stood up and denounced extremism and Islamic terrorism, ends up being condemned to death in the name of Islam and on the basis of the Koran. I had to recognise that … the root of evil is innate in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictual.”

Wow… this is the “message of Regensburg” all over again. In that speech, the pope quoted a Byzantine emperor asking what the Prophet Mohammad had brought the world but things “only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”. After that sparked off violent protests in the Muslim world, Benedict protested that he had only quoted the emperor and that did not mean he shared that view. But a pope speaking in public is not a professor debating in a seminar room. Rightly or wrongly, words, contexts and interpretations got amalgamated then and will be mixed up again now. If anyone out there seriously thinks this baptism, the Regensburg speech and Allam’s article won’t be rolled into one by commentators (Muslims and non-Muslims alike), please let me know how high you’d like to place your bet.

Talk about complicated… Who should do what in this situation? Should the pope be more of a diplomat or should he put Catholic priorities above all others? And how should Muslims react to this? These are important issues for this embryonic Catholic-Muslim dialogue and it would be interesting to hear what you think about this.

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Posting vacation photos is not what this blog is about, but this one has a religion angle. I just spent a week in India and attended the ordination of the new Roman Catholic bishop of Nashik, a city near Mumbai in an area where Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) is a potent political force.

Archbishop Felix Machado (standing at top of stairs) was under-secretary of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue in Rome before his appointment. So he invited leaders of all the religions in the city to join him and give a novel touch to his episcopal ordination. In the picture, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist leaders stand behind him as Acharya Swami Sanvindanand Saraswati, who heads a Hindu monastery in the city known across India as a Hindu pilgrimage centre, welcomes him to Nashik.

Michael Gonsalves, Special Correspondent for UCA News (Union of Catholic Asian News Agencies), wasn’t on vacation and he wrote this report on the event.

After much anticipation, a Muslim delegation representing the “Common Word” Muslim appeal for a theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam finally came to the Vatican. The five-member delegation held two days of meetings on March 4-5 with the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue to prepare the groundwork for the meeting of representatives a larger delegation.
Both sides decided to establish the “Catholic-Muslim Forum,” the start of a permanent dialogue between the two religions, and hold the first meeting in November. It will include an address by Pope Benedict.
This is the joint statement on the meeting.
While the highlight of the meeting and a news conference are found in the Reuters story of that day, here are some interesting additional comments from the news conference by the Muslim delegation which give useful insight into their point of view:

Prof. Dr. Aref Ali NAYED, Director, Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center, Amman, Jordan:
“By the end of the meetings, we emerged with a permanent structure that will ensure that the Catholic-Muslim engagement and dialogue continues into the future to work out issues and to work out an exchange of opinions about important matters. So, we together established something which is called the Catholic-Muslim Forum, which will be meeting every two years, one year in Rome and the subsequent meeting will be in a Muslim country, either Amman, Jordan or Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, or Indonesia and there will be alternation. This structure ensures that this is not just a momentary, exciting event but a process that begins with love of God and love of neighbour and continues to build upon this main theme that we gather around to address real issues that concern humanity today.”

NAYED in answer to a question on the assertion by some Catholic officials in the past that theological discussion with Muslims is not possible:

“I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding which was clarified through the two-day meeting. Some people said that in our previous calls for the dialogue to be theological and spiritual , some people interpreted that as escaping from social and political issues. We clarified that we did not mean it that way, what we meant was that addressing social and political issues should be rooted in the revelation of God and in the theological teachings of our two communities, that we cannot just do social-political discussion devoid of theology, that our social-political doctrine and preaching is based on our revelation and our tradition and our theology and we gave that clarification and it was well taken.”

NAYED on the long-term hopes for the Forum:

“The forum will go on for years and I’m sure that we will address more and more issues and more and more difficult issues as we go along.

NAYED on the aftermath of Pope Benedect’s Regensburg speech:

“You see, this whole initiative is about healing. It is about healing the wounds of a very pained and in many ways destroyed world. We have cruelty all over the place, we have wars, we have famines, we have massacres, we have terrorist acts, we have torture, we have people who are kidnapped.”

“For some Muslims the (wounds of the pope’s Regensburg lecture) are not completely healed and there are some Muslims who are boycotting the Vatican, and some important Muslims and some important bodies of Muslim scholars still feel offended by that quite deeply. We, just because we are part of this initiative, does not mean that we are not hurt by this. However, we must not only dwell on the negative but also dwell on the positive. There have been some recent positive moves by the Vatican which are much appreciated.”

“We don’t like to dwell on the negative. We would like to dwell on the positive because we need hope. We need to build up trust rather than mistrust. We have systematically replied to the claims that were made in the German lecture, both at the individual level by various scholars and also collectively in a paper signed by 38 Muslim scholars and we take those replies to stand because there has not been any substantial reply to such comments. We feel that scholarly discussion and claims should be met with scholarly response rather than with violence or agitation or anything like that. We feel that we are in a healing process. We were treated with dignity and respect these two days in Rome and our delegation was treated with the utmost courtesy and we appreciate that and we want to build on it.

Dr. Ibrahim KALIN, SETA Foundation, Ankara, Turkey, on how the Forum will blend in with other initiatives and whether meeting only every two years will be enough:

“You have to keep in mind that this is one of the many ongoing initiatives and channels of communications between Catholic and Muslims. This is not the first initiative nor will it be the last one. A number of initiatives are already underway … but this one will probably be with a new impetus because it will involve the highest authorities in the Vatican and on the Muslim side it also represents a major consensus, being able to bring 138 leading Muslim scholars from every single major Muslim countries, from Africa to Asia, from the Arab world to Europe and the United States, and the number of signatories has gone up to about 240. That means there is growing consensus among the Muslim scholars and religious leaders to deal with this issue, so in that regard, we will see how things go, but we believe that this is a good start.”
NAYED on what they hope to achieve at the November meeting and if they are truly representative of world Islam:

“When you are in a dark cave and in a very dark place, a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel or from above is extremely important for keeping your spirits up and for getting you out of the darkness you are in. Humanity today suffers tremendously from cruelty, it suffers tremendously from violence, from disrespect, from torments. We need signs of hope, so when you ask what we are trying to achieve by meeting the pope and not just the pope but other religious symbols like (Russian Orthodox Patriarch) Alexiy or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the evangelical leaders of the United States, we want the sight of these leaders with our leaders together, standing together in love of God, love of neighbour, so that we have signs of hope that the religious communities can a help to get humanity out of the cruelty cycle that it is in rather than being a cause for cruelty cycle.”

“The mainstream that I’m talking about represents 95-97 percent of humans who call themselves Muslims so if we can achieve peace amongst that community and the counterpart, that itself will give great hope and will also help us deal with the issue of extremism and violent minorities. Part of the amazing sort of negative dialectic is that by focusing on the negative all the time we make the negative grow. What we need is to refocus on the positive and the good so that the good can grow among us”.

KALIN:

“Muslims and Christians make up about 55 percent of the world and there will be no peace in the world unless there is peace between these two communities.”

NAYED on the structure of Islam:

“We believe that it is very important not to see the distribution of authority in Islam as a weakness. Some people say ‘you have a problem, you don’t have a pope.’ On the contrary, we feel that we are very strong even though we don’t have a pope … Islam functions perfectly without a centralised figure because of this phenomenon of distributed authority. It is God who meant it to be for us this way … “

Attenzione! The Vatican will issue an important doctrinal document on Friday “on some aspects of evangelisation.” Pope Benedict has a long track record of making sharp distinctions between Catholicism and other religions in his doctrinal declarations. Some of these have upset other Christians, others have angered Muslims and been challenged by Islamic scholars. This new text has been written by papal aides, not the pope himself, but it is expected to be a close reflection of his views. What Vatican observers are waiting to see is how clearly it states the Catholic view on converting others and how other religions react.

The document from the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed for over two decades before becoming pope in 2005, comes at a time of growing Catholic difficulties with Anglicans, Protestants and evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. Its hesitant reaction to an invitation leading Muslim scholars for a theological dialogue has raised questions about its interest in inter-faith relations. And evangelisation is now a sensitive topic for Christian churches. The Vatican is working with the World Council of Churches, the World Evangelical Alliance and Pentecostal leaders on a code of conduct for missionary work .

The declaration is expected to say that conversion remains a goal of Catholic missionary efforts and that Catholic theologians must not water this down by arguing that other faiths can be paths to salvation. This recalls Dominus Iesus, a document issued in 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) that said the Catholic Church was the only true church of Jesus Christ and others were “gravely deficient.” In fact, the document should be a guide on how to put Dominus Iesus into practice. The CDF began this process with a clarification of the 2000 document last June — a clarification that caused dismay among leading Protestant theologians.

Doesn’t the Roman Catholic Church have the right to restate its traditional beliefs? Of course it does. But it also operates in a broader context than the Catholic world alone, a context where Vatican documents are read carefully by other faiths for indications of how the world’s largest church thinks and what it plans to do. In a globalised world, leading religions are involved in inter-faith and ecumenical dialogues to foster better understanding among peoples. These efforts have led to much improved contact and comprehension among religions in the past few decades. Pope John Paul preferred this kind of dialogue, such as the 1986 World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi, Italy, but Cardinal Ratzinger kept his distance.

In recent years, this ecumenical drive seems to have slowed. Many faiths seem to be putting a renewed emphasis on their own identity. Again, that’s their right, but it does sometimes rub other religions the wrong way. Pope Benedict has done that before in the past, for example with Dominus Iesus (which upset Anglicans and Protestants) or with his 2006 Regensburg speech (which upset Muslims). He has shown more interest in working with the Eastern Orthodox churches. Wolfgang Huber, the top Lutheran bishop in Germany, has been especially critical of Benedict’s approach, for example calling the restatement of Dominus Iesus “an affront” to Protestants.

The line-up for Friday’s news conference in Rome about the new document indicates it is meant mostly as an internal text. It will be presented by CDF Prefect Cardinal William Levada, Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, and CDF Secretary Archbishop Angelo Amato.

Notably absent will be the two cardinals who head dicasteries — the Vatican equivalent of government ministries — that deal directly with other faiths. They are Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue and Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. Kasper was openly critical of the CDF in a speech to cardinals in Rome last month, saying the powerful dicastery “aroused perplexity and created discontent” by issuing its document restating Dominus Iesus last summer.

A statement by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) last week stressed issues expected to be part of the CDF document as well. In that statement, the bishops criticised Father Peter Phan, a leading theologian teaching at Georgetown University in Washington, for creating “considerable confusion” about Christ, the Church and other faiths. They restated Church teaching that Jesus Christ Catholicism was the only true church, Jesus Christ was mankind’s only saviour and other religions were “a preparation for the Gospel.” (Read John Allen’s full analysis here)

How do readers who follow developments in ecumenical and inter-faith dialogue see the way relations between faiths are going under Pope Benedict? Is his emphasis on traditional Catholic positions making it easier or more difficult to promote understanding among religions?

While Muslim scholars wait for an official Vatican response, more Catholic Islam experts have spoken out in favour of the scholars’ appeal for high-level talks between Muslim and Christian leaders. Five professors from the Vatican’s own Islam institute have described the appeal by 138 Muslim scholars as “a highly significant event” that showed “a new and creative attitude” towards the Koran. The five, all priests, include the rector and the dean of studies at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI) in Rome.

The interesting aspect here is that the experts seem to take a more positive view of the initiative than the Vatican apparently does. So do the other Christian leaders who have responded. The Catholic experts’ responses have not been without critical reflections — see the analyses from Jesuit scholars Samir Khalil Samir and Christian Troll. But most approach it as a novel opportunity to launch a serious dialogue, while comments by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran — the Church’s top official for relations with Islam — seemed to focus more on obstacles to further understanding. He said, for example, that a real theological discussion was not possible with Muslims because they did not question and analyse the Koran as Christian theologians dissect the Bible.

The PISAI professors’ letter said they wanted “to enter with an open mind into the dynamic of this event” and were “convinced of the good faith of those who produced it.” They said the 138 Muslim scholars had taken “a new and creative attitude relative to the Koranic text”. They noted several points on which the scholars took a broader and more inclusive approach than Muslims have usually done. “We note the emergence of a new attitude,” they wrote.

The professors are PISAI Rector Fr. Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, Dean of Studies Fr. Etienne Renaud. Fr. Michel Lagarde, Fr. Valentino Cottini and Fr. Felix Phiri.

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 138 Muslims scholars who recently invited Christian leaders to a high-level inter-faith dialogue feel their unprecedented step of uniting so many different Islamic representatives has created a momentum that must not be lost. The responses from Christian churches have shown varying levels of urgency in taking up the challenge. Many denominations, most notably the Anglicans and Lutherans, responded promptly and positively to their appeal “A Common Word Between Us And You.” The Roman Catholic Church has been more cautious, and its provisional response has gone from vaguely positive to cautiously critical.

The Muslim scholars have responded with a direct appeal to the Pope to speak publicly about their initiative. Sheikh Izzeldin Ibrahim, a signatory who is a cultural adviser to the United Arab Emirates government, made a verbal appeal to that effect to Benedict when they lunched together in Naples on Sunday at the Sant’Egidio community’s annual inter-faith meeting. He told him the Muslim scholars were disappointed not only at what they saw as the Vatican’s hesitant response to their appeal but also to the lack of a Catholic response to the letter of 38 scholars last year to his controversial Regensburg speech. And, as signatory Aref Ali Nayed of the Cambridge Interfaith Program in Britain told Reuters, they made it official with a letter handed to Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told Vatican Radio on Monday that he has been discussing with other Christian leaders in Naples what the churches should do next. “I’d like to start exploring what kind of common Christian response there might be to the ‘Common Word’ document that’s come from the Muslim leaders,” he said. Christian leaders were “looking at various theoretical possibilities” and would like to have “proper face-to-face discussions with some of these people. But how to do that is quite a logistical challenge,” he said.

My story on the latest statement from the Muslim scholars outlines their concerns. They seem to feel that Tauran, by bringing up issues such as interpretation of the Koran or reciprocity in building churches and mosques in the Middle East and Europe, is going beyond the scope of the narrowly focused consensus they were able to build. They also noted that the annual messages the Vatican sends for Eid el-Fitr at the end of Ramadan “had been made polemical of late.” In this year and last, these messages included pointed appeals for all religions to fight terrorism and violence in the name of religion (compare them with earlier messages here).

The website for A Common Word has the full text plus pages of reactions from Christian leaders and theologians. Another reaction from a leading Catholic Islam expert has come from Father Christian Troll, S.J., a German Jesuit based in Frankfurt who lectured alongside Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, S.J. at the pope’s 2005 Islam seminar with his former students. Here are excerpts (in German).

It would have been the Vatican equivalent of an instant reaction if Pope Benedict had actually mentioned the recent dialogue appeal by 138 Muslim scholars when he spoke today at a major inter-faith gathering in Naples. There were several comments from Catholic experts in the past week and an influential cardinal hinted he would have something to say. In the end, the Pope did not make a direct response. But he echoed the message that “faiths must work together to stamp out religiously motivated hatred which uses God as an excuse for violence,” as our reporter Phil Stewart wrote from Naples.

Not mentioning the letter explicitly does not indicate disagreement. His speech (here in English translation, here in Italian original) was focused on the theme of the meeting (”For a World without Violence: Religions and Cultures in Dialogue”). In it, he also said, “The Catholic Church intends to continue to walk the path of dialogue to favour understanding among different cultures, traditions and religious learning. I strongly hope that this spirit (of peace) spreads above all where tensions are strongest, where freedom and the respect for others are denied and men and women suffer because of the consequences of intolerance.” So no doors have been closed, while no further details of the Vatican view have been given.

There was a small reminder of the Muslim appeal, however. At the lunch for the assembled religious leaders, Benedict sat at a table with Israel’s Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger, Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Dr. Izzeldin Ibrahim. The latter was identified only as a cultural adviser to the United Arab Emirates government. How did he get a seat at the top table? We don’t know, but in doing a few quick checks to try to find out, Phil and our Dubai bureau dug up something a bit more interesting about him. Ibrahim is one of the 138 signatories of the Muslim appeal.

The Vatican is taking its time to study the dialogue appeal from 138 Muslim scholars before giving an official reply, but the Catholic Church’s Islam and inter-faith experts seem to be lining up to comment on it. After Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, S.J. yesterday, Cardinal Angelo Scola has given his positive analysis of it today. Since taking his post in 2002 as Patriarch of Venice, a city that has had extensive trading links to the East for centuries, the former rector of the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome has started up the Studium Generale Marcianum institute to study Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim culture. He also launched a unique biannual review named Oasis to foster Christian-Muslim understanding. It publishes reports and reviews in four separate bilingual editions — Italian and Arabic, French and Arabic, English and Arabic and English and Urdu.

In a front-page interview with the Milan daily Il Foglio (here in Italian), Scola said the call for dialogue took a realistic approach and the number and prominence of its signatories were impressive. Scola said he was also impressed “by the fact, probably without precedent, that the quotes concerning Jesus Christ were taken from the Gospels and not from the Koran. … It is a very encouraging signal, since it demonstrates that good will and dialogue can overcome prejudices. It is a spiritual reflection on the love of God.”

“The document, set in the perspective of the double love of God and neighbour, highlights a part of Muslim tradition that has been partially overshadowed by the growth of fundamentalism,” he said. “The Muslim leaders identify themselves with those ‘others’ of whom Jesus said: ‘those who are not against us are with us’.” Between the lines, he said, could also be read a condemnation of terrorism.

Scola said the text was of necessity limited in its scope. “We shouldn’t ask more of this document that it can give,” he said. “It is only the prelude to a theological dialogue that, in an atmosphere of great mutual esteem, proposes to investigate the contents of these two pillars (the love of the one God and the love of one’s neighbour) in the two religious traditions.”

Asked if Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech had triggered this reaction, the cardinal said: “Surely the pope’s speech set off some very interesting dynamics within Islam. As the signatories recognise, the interconnections between Christians and Muslims in today’s world make it impossible to put off taking a position regarding the problem of the coexistence of different faiths … The document indicates an important starting point for an authentic dialogue.”