(Photo: A painting commemorating six slain Jesuit priests,16 Nov 2009/Luis Galdamez)

El Salvador has honored six Jesuit priests killed by the army 20 years ago in one of the most notorious atrocities of the country’s long and vicious civil war.

Leftist President Mauricio Funes, the first leader from a party of former Cold War rebels that fought in the conflict, granted the priests El Salvador’s highest honor posthumously in a ceremony on Monday.

U.S.-backed soldiers shot the priests at their home at a local university on the night of Nov. 16, 1989, to silence their strong criticism of rights abuses committed by the army during the 12-year civil war that ended in 1992.  Five of the priests were Spanish and one was Salvadorean.

Read the whole story here. More on this at … Vatican Radio … BBC (photo essay) … Catholic News Service … Los Angeles Times … National Jesuit News.

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If “the devil is in the details” when two groups seek a merger, where will he be hiding when the Vatican talks with disaffected Anglicans who want to join the Roman church? Neither the agenda nor the schedule for these talks are clear, but some issues are starting to emerge as possible hurdles to a smooth switchover for Anglicans who want to “swim the Tiber.”

(Photo: St. Peter’s Basilica and the Tiber River, 23 Dec 1999/Mario Laporta)

There is little clarity yet on either side. The Vatican has not spelled out the conditions of the “Apostolic Constitution” to accept Anglicans who want to join Catholicism while maintaining some of their own traditions. Additionally, there are varied faces of Anglicanism, which in its dogmas and practices stands somewhere between Roman Catholicism and Protestant traditions such as the Lutheran or Reformed churches. This will clearly take a while to work out.

The spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, played down any problems when the offer was announced. But several reactions from Anglicans to Tuesday’s announcement, including from some inclined to make the switch, have begun to trace the outlines of the looming doctrinal debates among Anglicans worldwide and between the Vatican and Anglicans knocking at its door.

Bishop Donald Harvey, moderator of the Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC), posted a succinct summary of sticky issues on his group’s website. This group of about 3,500 regular churchgoers is a diocese of the breakaway conservative Anglican Church in North America, which claims over 100,000 members across the continent. Harvey asked:

1. “Will the Roman Catholic Church require Anglican priests who choose this option to be re-ordained?

(NB:  The Vatican has traditionally said that Anglican ordinations are not valid.) 

2. “Will people who accept this invitation have to subscribe to Roman Catholic dogmas to which the Anglican Formularies are diametrically opposed – such as “Papal Infallibility”, the “Immaculate Conception” and Transubstantiation?

(NB: Papal infallibility says the pope cannot err when he rules on matters of faith and morals. The Catholic belief that the Virgin Mary was born without Original Sin is not a dogma in Anglicanism, although some Anglo-Catholics believe it. The Catholic dogma of transubstantiation says bread and wine actually become the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, while Anglicans believe this transformation is only symbolic.)

3. “Will Anglican priests – especially married ones – choosing to accept the Roman Catholic Church’s invitation have equal status with existing Roman Catholic clergy and will their ministry be interchangeable and welcomed in Roman Catholic parishes?”

In his statement, Harvey brought up another issue that could lead to disagreement — the meaning of the word “catholic.” Anglicans say they are a part of an undivided catholic (i.e. universal) Church, while Rome says it represents the true Church and churches that split off at the Reformation are not churches in the true sense. Pope Benedict has been quite clear on this point, most notably in his 2000 doctrinal document Dominus Iesus. Harvey quoted an ANiC priest as saying: “As for me and my house, we will remain ever faithful to the authority and primacy of the Holy Scriptures and the Faith and Order of the undivided Catholic Church. I need not become a Roman Catholic to be a Catholic Christian. As an Anglican, I am a Catholic Christian.”

(Photo: Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and Pope Benedict at the Vatican, 23 Nov 2006/Alessandro Bianchi)

Bishop Jack Iker, head of the Episcopal (U.S. Anglican) diocese of Forth Worth, Texas, touched on the same issue in his reaction: “Not all Anglo-Catholics can accept certain teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, nor do they believe that they must first convert to Rome in order to be truly catholic Christians.”

Pittsburgh-based Archbishop Robert Duncan, Primate of the Anglican Church in North America formed by that split off from the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada last year, wrote on the ACNA website: “This significant decision represents a recognition of the integrity of the Anglican tradition within the broader Christian church” and added that “our historic differences over church governance, dogmas regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary and the nature of Holy Orders continue to be points of prayerful dialogue.”

Another point is ecclesiology, or what the precise nature and role of a church are. The Roman Catholic Church is hierarchical, with an authoritative pope at its head, a set body of dogma and a clear chain of command through bishops down to the parish level. Anglicanism is organised around national churches with considerable autonomy and its spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has influence but not authority over them.

As Rev. Rod Thomas, chairman of the evangelical Reform group in the Church of England (C of E), noted on his website: “If priests really are out of sympathy with the C of E’s doctrine (as opposed to the battles we are having over women’s ministry and sexuality), then perhaps it is better they make a clean break and go to Rome. However, when they do, they will have to accommodate themselves to Rome’s top-down approach to church life, whereas the C of E has always stressed the importance of decision making at the level of the local church.”

(Photo: All Saints Cathedral Church in Nairobi, 3 Nov 2003/Antony Njuguna)

Reactions from Africa, where traditional Anglicans opposed to female and gay bishops are the majority, showed that some heads of the national churches there prefer the Anglican Communion’s “unity in diversity” to Roman discipline. “Anglo-Catholic Anglicans have been disillusioned by the liberal churches in the West that created a theological crisis with their liberal attitude to sexuality. Many of them would be happy with the Pope’s initiative. But the African Church does not need that because it is strong on biblical theology,” the primate of the Church of Uganda, Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi, was quoted on the local New Vision website as saying. “The African Anglican Church has undertaken measures to deal with the excesses of liberalism that invaded the western church. We are a Bible-believing Church.”

What do you think? Where do you see potentials bumps on the disaffected Anglicans’ road to Rome?

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– Saritha Rai writes for the GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. –

It is dawn in Kerala, a palm frond of a state in India's South West. As the sun's first rays hit the church steeple, a Holy Mass is being conducted in the local Malayalam language.

Only, the prayer is dedicated to a newborn by his Catholic family half a world away in the United States.

Requests for these so-called Mass Intentions, or prayers offered for a specific reason, pour into India from the United States, Canada and Europe, where there is a huge shortage of priests.

This outsourcing to faraway India is a quaint practice that has been called "religious outsourcing."

But now, the severe global economic crisis and bankruptcies in Western churches are hitting even this unusual practice. In Kerala and other parts of India, where the Roman Catholic Church still thrives, outsourced mass intentions are dwindling and striking the income of poorer priests and impoverished churches.

Sebastian Adayanthrath, bishop of Kerala's Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese, one of the oldest in the country, said he is observing a big slowdown in incoming requests for mass intentions from the West.

"There is a 50 percent fall recently in outsourced mass intentions," Adayanthrath told GlobalPost in a telephone interview.

Church bankruptcies, diminishing Sunday collections and falling donations from the faithful in Western parishes are all reasons, Adayanthrath said.

Outsourcing, a practice where tasks are sent to cheaper, more efficient locations, has been a sore point for Westerners especially in these economically depressed times.

For the last decade, India has particularly benefitted from the outsourcing of a multitude of tasks such as writing software code, providing customer service, reading x-rays and filing tax returns.

With religious outsourcing, Westerners request Indian churches to hold Holy Mass in memory of a dead family member, or thanksgiving for a child’s college admission, to celebrate a wedding anniversary or even for unusual causes such as the well-being of their favorite sports stars.

"Each mass is paid a stipend of $5 (250 rupees) upwards, supplementing the income of priests who are otherwise paid 50 rupees for the same service by locals," said Rector Father Augustine Thottakara of Bangalore-based seminary Dharmaram College.

About two percent of India’s 1.2 billion population is Christian, mostly of the Roman Catholic faith. Kerala in Southern India has a big concentration of churches and the faithful.

The requests come to the churches and the local clergy through the Vatican, through clergymen in overseas churches and even through religious bodies. In these days of digital communication, requests have speeded up through email.

Western labor unions have criticized such outsourcing as commoditizing spirituality.

The Indian church stoutly defends the practice. "Offering mass intentions on behalf of Westerners are not a business, it is a custom that benefits both sides," said Father Paul Thelakkat, spokesman for the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala’s Cochin town.

But the eastward flow of prayers has ebbed somewhat recently, following the graph of the worldwide economic state.

Where thousands of prayers were flooding parishes in Kerala, church leaders say that they are unable to get or route Western prayers and stipend to cash-strapped parishes and needy priests.

The trends in Kerala mirror what is happening in churches elsewhere in India.

The drop in religious outsourcing is hurting those like Father Bosco Puthoor, rector at the St. Joseph’s Pontifical Seminary in Aluva near Cochin.

Father Puthoor earns 2,500 rupees ($50) as a monthly salary and supplements his own income, as well as that of 22 other teaching priests in his seminary, through religious outsourcing.

"It is a pity that this practice of mutual support between the East and the West is declining," Father Bosco said.

More from GlobalPost:

India's unfriendly skies

The Ugly Indian

The Mormons in India

A Roman Catholic nun who left her convent in India after 33 years of service has penned an unflattering picture of life within the cloistered walls in a book that may further embarrass the Church.

In “Amen: The Autobiography of a Nun”, published in India in English this month, Sister Jesme tells of sexual relations between some priests and nuns, homosexuality in the convent and discrimination and corruption in Catholic institutions…

“Amen” grabbed media headlines in February, when it was first published in Malayalam — the regional language of Kerala. With the new English edition and offers of a film based on the book, Sister Jesme’s plea for a reformation of the Church is now set to reach a wider audience.

Read our feature here.

The Vatican warning to the ultra-traditionalist SSPX not to ordain new priests this month without Roman approval had no discernible effect on the rebel Catholic group. Soon after the Vatican declared the ordinations would be illegitimate, Father Yves Le Roux, rector of the SSPX’s St Thomas Aquinas seminary in Winona, Minnesota, said the ordination of 13 new priests there would go ahead on Friday.

“Absolutely. We are doing it,” he told our Vatican correspondent Philip Pullella by telephone. “This is something the Vatican feels it has to say. It’s a political statement but the reality is totally different.”

(Photo: SSPX ordains deacons in Écône, Switzerland, 3 April 2009/Valentin Flauraud)

The SSPX seminary at Zaitzkofen, in the German state of Bavaria, declared its intention to go ahead with its June 27 ordinations in a statement posted on its website on Monday (here in German original and in English). It argued that Pope Benedict’s decision in January to lift the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops was a “confidence-building measure for the coming theological discussions with representatives of the Holy See” meant to thrash out an official position in the Church for the SSPX.” Further ordinations are due at the SSPX headquarters in Écône, Switzerland on June 29.

Defying a papal warning against ordaining new priests before its official status was clarified seems to be the opposite of a confidence-building measure on the SSPX’s part. As the BBC’s David Willey put it in his report from Rome tonight, Pope Benedict “gave them an inch and they took a mile.”

So the SSPX has thrown the ball back into the Vatican’s court. The Vatican statement said “the ordinations should still be considered illegitimate” and “doctrinal and, consequently, also disciplinary questions still remain open.” That leaves open the option of a further reaction from Rome, or possibly from Regensburg Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller. Or there might be no reaction, just that curious Vatican silence that caused it such trouble after the Regensburg speech and the readmission of the Holocaust-denying SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson. That would leave the narrow issue unresolved and pose wider questions about Pope Benedict’s leadership.

The ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), recently in the headlines for having a Holocaust denier as one of its four bishops recently readmitted to the Roman Catholic Church, looks set to push the envelope with Rome again by ordaining 21 new priests in three different countries on June 27.* Bishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Regensburg, the German diocese where the SSPX seminary at Zaitzkofen plans to ordain three of those men, has declared the planned ordinations a violation of Church law and has urged the Vatican to warn the SSPX not to go through with them. He told Bavarian Radio on Sunday that he hadn’t heard back from Rome yet and would bring up the issue with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) personally on his next monthly trip there.

*CORRECTION: Not all will be ordained that day — 13 priests will be ordained in Minnesota on June 19.

(Photo: Bishop Müller, 21 Sept 2007/Michael Dalder)

In the subtle ways of the Vatican, a non-response from Rome to a bishop’s query is like the yellow signal on a traffic light. It’s neither yes nor no, in that vague way that says if it’s not openly forbidden, one might be able to live with it, but, uh, we don’t want to put that in writing, so over to you. The question now is whether the Vatican will opt to live with this latest challenge to its authority.

The Vatican has made several concessions to the SSPX, the biggest being the lifting in January of the 1988 excommunications of its four bishops. This meant they were back in good standing as Catholics, but they had no official function as bishops and therefore (presumably) should not use their episcopal privileges without permission from their ecclesiastical superiors. But once the uproar over the Holocaust denials by SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson died down, the SSPX announced it would go ahead with the planned ordinations — three in Zaitzkofen, 13 at the St Thomas Aquinas Seminary at Winona, Minnesota and the rest at the SSPX headquarters at Ecône, Switzerland. “The benevolent act of the Holy See cannot be interpreted as a desire to asphyxiate the Society of St. Pius X,” it said in a statement.

Pope Benedict, in an extraordinary mea culpa letter after the uproar over Williamson, called the lifting of the excommunications a “discreet gesture of mercy” and “a gesture of reconciliation.” He then asked: “Can it be completely mistaken to work to break down obstinacy and narrowness, and to make space for what is positive and retrievable for the whole?” He said that welcoming back other rebel communities had “changed their interior attitudes” and “enabled them to move beyond one-sided positions and broke down rigidity so that positive energies could emerge for the whole.” So Benedict seems to see the lifting of the excommunications as a magnanimous gesture that would be matched by more flexibility from the steadfast SSPX.

(Photo: Pope Benedict, 7 June 2009/Max Rossi)

In an June 1 interview with Vatican Radio, Bishop Müller said he contacted the Zaitzkofen seminary after learning of the planned ordinations. “I told them the ordinations violated canon law and that, in such a precarious situation, one must let Rome say how to proceed … One must simply suspend everything until this society’s position in canon law is cleared up. In the letter the society wrote to the pope in January, it said it fully accepted the pope’s primacy … they are not prepared to accept the consequences.”

On Bavarian Radio, he said the CDF “should say, in a theologically clear way, that both those seeking and those performing the ordinations are not acting legally and the ordinations are therefore not allowed, even if they are formally valid.” He said he wanted to ask the prefect of the CDF, Cardinal William Levada, about this.

Do you agree with Bishop Müller that the SSPX decision to proceed with the ordinations is a provocation? Should the Vatican put its foot down and insist these bishops show the respect for authority that they pledged in their appeal for the excommunications to be lifted? Or should Rome let them go ahead, in the interest of healing the only schism resulting from the Second Vatican Council?

(Click on the photo above for a slideshow on the Samaritans)

Samaritan High Priest Abdel Moin Sadaqa was relaxing on his porch watching Al-Jazeera on a wide-screen TV when we dropped by his home to talk about his ancient religion. “I like to keep up with the news,” the 83-year-old head of one of the world’s oldest and smallest religions explained as he turned down the volume. Told we wanted to make him part of the news, more precisely part of a feature on Samaritanism, he sat up, carefully put on his red priestly turban and proceeded to chat away in the fluent English he learned as a boy under the British mandate for Palestine. Our interview with him and other Samaritans were the basis for my feature “Samaritans use modern means to keep ancient faith.”

(Photo: High Priest Abdel Moin Sadaqa at his home, 19 May 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Visiting the descendants of the biblical Samaritans was the last stop in a series of visits in Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank I made after covering Pope Benedict’s trip to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Leaving Jerusalem with Ivan Karakashian from our bureau there, we drove through Israel’s imposing security barrier to Ramallah, picked up our Nablus stringer Atef Sa’ad there and then drove north along the web of priority roads that link the spreading network of Israeli settlements in the West Bank back to Israel. Signs of the Israeli-Palestinian face-off were all around — Israeli army patrols and checkpoints, guarded Jewish enclaves flying the Star of David flag on the hills and Palestinian villages with their mosques and minarets in the valleys. The tension seemed to melt away, though, when we turned onto a narrow road to wind our way up Mount Gerizim to the Samaritan village of Kiryat Luza.

The West Bank Samaritans used to live in Nablus, the nearest Palestinian city, but left it when the first intifada in 1987 brought the tension too close for comfort. The Samaritans get along with both Israelis and Palestinians and many have identity papers from both sides, Husney Kohen, one of the faith’s 12 hereditary priests, told us at the community’s small museum in Kiryat Luza. But their custom of not taking sides and keeping secrets meant that gunmen began using their neighbourhood as a place to execute enemies in broad daylight without worrying about witnesses. “We weren’t hurt, but we were afraid,” he said. Now living on their holy mountain, the Samaritans feel safe.

The museum looked like a treasure trove of ancient Judaica, but Kohen made sure to point out the differences between Samaritanism and Judaism. “We are Israelites but not Jewish … we have 7,000 differences between our Torah and the Jewish one,” he declared as he showed a copy of a Samaritan scroll he said was the oldest book in the world. The original is locked in their temple for safe keeping. The museum boasted genealogical lists dating generations back to Adam and a few paintings of biblical scenes where Samaritans play a cameo role.

Amid all the ancient artifacts, it seemed strange to hear Kohen talk about Samaritan boys meeting girls over the internet or Samaritan couples going to Israeli hospitals for pre-nuptual genetic tests. Samaritan life is governed by strict laws, especially those isolating women during menstruation and after childbirth, but Samaritan women do not keep any other kind of purdah. In fact, they stand out in Nablus — along with the few Christian women there — walking around in western clothes and flowing hair among the veiled and covered Muslims. Kohen’s oldest daughter works as a journalist for the Palestinian news agency Wafa, the second is a pharmacist and the third is studying English at the university in Nablus.

(Photo: Samaritan priest Husney Kohen with a copy of the faith’s ancient Torah in the Samaritan museum, 19 May 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Kohen caught our attention by mentioning mail-order brides and we wanted to pursue that angle, but he said several couples had been burned by intrusive questions from journalists and no longer wanted to give interviews. He mentioned that High Priest Sadaqa’s daughter-in-law was Ukrainian, but wasn’t sure we could see her. When we called on Sadaqa, though, he was more than ready to introduce Shura to us.

The problem was that she wasn’t as ready to be introduced. With her fair hair, black pants and tank top, she could have passed as a European tourist visiting the town. She reluctantly sat for a few minutes to a hail of questions, from Atef in Arabic and Sadaqa in English (for my benefit), and stammered a few shy answers in Arabic.

There was so much we wanted to ask — how did you get here? how do you like it? was it hard to convert? would you recommend this life to other foreign women? — but she suddenly ducked back into the house, saying she had to work in the kitchen. That was the end of our fleeting encounter with one of the women helping to keep Samaritanism alive. (For more on Shura, see below)

While most of Samaritanism’s outside brides have been Jews from Israel, Kohen said three were Muslims and five Christians like Shura. All of them came from far away — the Muslims from Turkey and the Christians from Russia and Ukraine. Seeking converts among the local Muslim majority or the tiny Christian minority in Nablus could strain the good relations the Samaritans have with their neighbours.

Another Samaritan priest, Khader Adel Kohen, said he didn’t want his three sons to marry foreign brides when they grew up. “It’s better to take one from the Jewish community, as long as she converts,” he said. “I have nothing against Russians and Ukrainians, but we don’t know who they are.”

(Photo: Samaritan priest Khader Adel Kohen in Nablus, 19 May 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Hearing so much about their strict rules and the struggle to keep the religion alive prompted me to ask Sadaqa if the community had any rebels. Some had left, he conceded, but very few. And are there any atheists? He waved his hand dismissively and frowned. “Thank God, there are none. This is the biggest blessing. A Samaritan would never abandon his religion voluntarily.”

So did Sadaqa, who has travelled the world and studied the scriptures of other religions, have any advice for faiths that were losing their flocks? “I know everything, I see it, but I don’t want to interfere,” he said. “I can lead my community but I haven’t the strength to lead the whole world. Those who preserve their religion, God preserves them.”

Filmmaker Efim Kuchuk and Mark Mejerson interviewed Shura and her husband for their 2007 film “New Samaritans.” Among other things, it shows Samaritans with the genetic defects from intermarriage that also worry the community. Here is a YouTube excerpt:

Liberation Theology has long been out of fashion at the Vatican, but its effects have lived on in Latin America. One is a tradition of foreign-born Catholic priests who went to the region to preach its message of justice for the poor and oppressed. But the falling number of priests in Europe and the United States and a turn away from this activist view of the Gospels has taken its toll. The clerics defending peasants against landowners and denouncing child prostitution, drug trafficking and illegal logging are growing old and the flow of foreign priests is drying up. There are Brazilian priests, but with family members living in the country, they are often more vulnerable to death threats.

Stuart Grudgings, senior correspondent in our Rio de Janeiro bureau, travelled to Abaetetuba at the mouth of the Amazon in northeastern Brazil to visit Italian-born Bishop Flavio Giovenale and other members of this disappearing breed of priests.

Read the whole feature here.

(Photo left: Bishop Flavio Giovenale, 11 Feb 2009/Paulo Santos)

(Photo right: Sunset over Abaetetuba, 28 Sept 2008/Paulo Santos)

The financial crisis so dominates the news these days that reports on a meeting of the Christian and Muslim religious leaders and scholars pictured here zero in first on what they said about the economy. These men and women of faith would readily admit they look like anything but a group of portfolio managers, but comments on the crisis now get top billing no matter where they come from. We grabbed the crisis angle too, breaking out the economic statement from the final communique yesterday as our first item on this meeting. With that done, let me go back to look at the rest of the news from the latest Common Word dialogue meeting in Cambridge and London on October 12-15.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this meeting was how both sides — 17 Muslims and 19 Christians — worked to understand the other’s faith and find ways to spread that understanding within their communities. For example, in his opening address, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tackled the problem of how to deal with the the two faiths speak differently about God. “While what we say about God is markedly different,  irreducibly different in many respects,” he said, “we recognize in each other’s language and practice a similarity in the way we understand the impact of God on human lives, and thus a certain similarity in what we take for granted about the nature or character of God.” 

Meeting in Cambridge, they held sessions in the “scriptural reasoning” practiced at the university’s Inter-Faith Programme. In these sessions, Christians, Muslims and Jews read passages from their scriptures together and then explain them to each other. David Ford, an Anglican theologian from Northern Ireland who is director of the Inter-Faith Programme, told me he attended one such session with a British Anglican bishop, a German Jesuit priest, a Muslim sheikh from the Emirates, a Libyan Islamic theologian, a British Methodist theologian and an Iranian ayatollah.  “We were all studying together and dealing with important issues,” he said. “Some of the Muslim scholars were doing this for the first time with Christians,” said Aref Ali Nayed, a senior advisor to the Inter-Faith Programme.

Nayed told me the theological issues they discussed included the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, the way canons of scripture are established, the question of prophesy, the notion of a convenant with God and various aspects of hermeneutics, or how to analyse scripture. At their last meeting at Yale University in July, both sides explained how they understood concepts like love, compassion and mercy. The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God was also discussed and that dialogue continues, he said.

If those terms seem overly academic, consider what an agreement could mean down at the level of the average church or mosque. If Muslims understand how Christians understand the Trinity, for example, then imams might not stoke tensions by preaching that Christians are polytheists.  By the same token, priests and pastors might not condemn Islam as a false religion if they believed Christians and Muslims worshipped the same God and valued love, compassion and mercy in similar ways.

As Egypt’s Grand Mufti Sheikh Ali Gomaa put it: “We want to listen in order to correct misconceptions, to dissolve the ice, to find what is common, and to cooperate for the sake of worshipping God, engaging in positive development and purifying the human soul … we reject this constant provocation that generates hatred and accordingly instability and division.” 

But how do you get from here to there? The meeting addressed that in its communique:

“Looking towards the future, mindful of the crucial importance of education and inspired by our presence in a great seat of learning, we have also been keen to identify specific ways in which our encounter might be broadened and deepened.  We have, therefore, committed ourselves to the following over the coming year:

· To identify and promote the use of educational materials, for all age-groups and in the widest possible range of languages, that we accept as providing a fair reflection of our faiths

· To build a network of academic institutions, linking scholars, students and academic resources, with various committees and teams which can work on shared values

· To identify funds to facilitate exchanges between those training for roles of leadership within our religious communities.”

“I sense in this meeting a feeling of urgency, especially on the Muslim side, that we need to show our communities that dialogue does bear fruit and improve their lives to some extent,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America. The way to do this is to have leaders of each faith speak out when the other is under attack. The communique denounced the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Mosul: “These threats undermine the centuries-old tradition of local Muslims protecting and nourishing the Christian community, and must stop …  We find no justification in Islam or Christianity for those promoting the insecurity or perpetrating the violence evident in parts of Iraq.”

Mattson, a professor of Islamic Studies at Hartford Seminary in the United States, told me U.S. Muslims want to hear similar statement from Christian leaders condemning “the dehumanisation of Muslims, like these public attacks on Islam that you see with the distribution of the DVD ‘Obsession’.”

The communique also mentioned another aspect of inter-faith dialogue that the Common Word declaration originally did not address but participants feel they must include. It said the scriptural reading sessions had “given us each a greater appreciation for the richness of the other’s heritage as well as an awareness of the potential value in being joined by Jewish believers in a journey of mutual discovery and attentiveness to the texts we hold sacred.” In contrast to the Yale meeting, there were no Jewish participants in Cambridge, but Nayed said one session held a conference call with a Jewish scholar to discuss ways of involving them more in future.

To return to the financial theme this post started with — the “trickle-down effect” is under fire these days for not being an efficient way to spread wealth in an economy. In the context of inter-faith dialogue, however, it seems like the best way to proceed. Ford, Mattson and Nayed all stressed to me the importance of having Christian and Muslim scholars get to know each other and discuss issues in person. Nayed said agreement reached at such meetings could trickle down through the communities: “To have top Muslim theologians become personal friends of top Christian theologians has a monumental effect because they all have graduate students who will teach other students who will become preachers in mosques and churches. This is really important.”

Loving thy neighbour is not always easy, especially, it seems, when it comes to the traditional site of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus.

Christian factions have squabbled for years over who controls which parts of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s divided Old City.

Sometimes they even come to blows.

Priests and worshippers at an Orthodox Palm Sunday celebration on April 20 ended up brawling after Armenian clerics apparently kicked a Greek Orthodox priest out of a shrine at the church — one of Christianity’s holiest.

Police weren’t sure what sparked the fist-fight, but friction between the sects has been simmering for centuries. A Muslim keeps the key, and about 150 years ago, theTurks elaborately carved up territory in the church between the feuding Christian factions.

Police are braced for another punch-up when the eastern churches celebrate Easter on April 27 with the centuries-old “Miracle of the Holy Fire” ceremony.

Orthodox Christians believe the Holy Spirit miraculously lights candles when the Greek patriarch enters the shrine meant to mark Jesus’s tomb alone. The Armenians think their leader should be allowed in too.

I recently interviewed the director of a new Israeli documentary film called “Holy Fire”, which explores the religious fervour that grips Jerusalem’s Old City, revered by Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Yoram Sabo, a secular Jew, said he was initially befuddled by the priestly quarelling at the Holy Sepulchre. But after three years of following the story’s twists and turns he came to understand that conflict was almost inevitable in a place endowed with such meaning for so many.

“It may seem trivial,” he said. “But you have to look at it through religious glasses — people fight for what they think is important.”