Religious leaders gather for World Unification and peace conference
Pastor Dale Morgan
Religious leaders gather for World Unification and peace conference*
Ecumenical Madness: Building The One World Church
NAPLES, Italy (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI meets Sunday with religious
leaders from around the world — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and
Zoroastrians — who are gathering for a religious unification and peace
conference in the southern Italian city of Naples.
Benedict won't be participating in the three-day conference but timed a
one-day visit to Naples to coincide with it. He will meet with the
religious leaders ahead of its start, organizers said.
Among those expected to attend are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan
Williams; one of Israel's chief rabbis, Yona Metzger; Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world's 250 million
Orthodox Christians; several Muslim academics and the political adviser
to the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani.
Benedict has made reaching out to other faiths — particularly Muslims
and Jews — a priority of his pontificate.
The Naples meeting comes more than two decades after Pope John Paul II
invited world religious leaders to the hillside town of Assisi,
birthplace of peace-loving St. Francis, for unification talks..
That Oct. 27, 1986 prayer meeting — attended by the Dalai Lama, Mother
Teresa and a host of interfaith leaders — prompted grumbling from within
the Vatican that the event suggested that the Catholic Church considered
all religious traditions equally valid.
Benedict — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the head of the Vatican's
orthodoxy watchdog — was among those opposed to the meeting and simply
didn't show up, Italian news reports have said. He did attend a repeat
prayer day hosted by John Paul in Assisi in 2002, the reports said.
Organizers contended there was nothing unusual about Benedict's lack of
participation with the other religious leaders at the Naples conference,
noting that over two decades John Paul only participated in the two or
three peace meetings that he himself sponsored.
"There is nothing to explain," said Mario Marazziti, spokesman of the
Sant'Egidio Community, the lay Catholic organization that is organizing
the meeting. "What's more, the pope this time will meet with the
religious representatives."
Marazziti said the choice of Naples was particularly significant to host
this year's conference, whose theme is "For a world without violence:
religions and cultures in dialogue."
"Naples is a city that knows well the weight of violence," he said. "Not
only the problem of violence and killings, but the violence that is
today a dimension of daily life that all big cities of the world must
deal with."
During the conference, religious and political leaders — including the
presidents of Tanzania and Ecuador — will participate in more than 30
panel discussions on topics as diverse as AIDS, the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, faith and science and Islam and peace.