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Trends and Developments in Interreligious Dialogue

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Trends and Developments in Interreligious Dialogue GEORG EVERS TRENDS AND DEVELOPMENTS IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE General Observations It is often asked if the many activities in the field of interreligious dialogue and encounter really yield tangible and concrete results. The most common objection to the whole project of interreligious dialogue is that those who usually attend these meetings are people who are already “converts to the cause of dialogue” and therefore do not need to be taught that members of different religions should attempt to understand one another and live in peace. Even worse is the scathing or cynical remark that interreligious dialogue is the field where those people meet who are not at home in any given religious tradition. On the other hand, there is agreement that engagement in interreligious dialogue should never be connected with an agenda of achieving clearly described objectives and aims. Dialogue should not be burdened by too many concrete expectations that would oblige the participants to come up with resolutions and proposals that cannot be realized most of the time. One essential element of dialogue among members of different religious traditions is that dialogue should be “unintentional” (absichtslos)— expressing the expectation that those who engage in dialogue should not pursue their own hidden agendas. If one agrees to this description of dialogue, then the question may be raised: Is dialogue just l’art pour l’art for those who enjoy en- gaging in an exchange of rather abstract ideas from different religious traditions while forgetting the real problems of our global world where communal harmony often is threatened by religiously motivated prejudices, hate and violence? If we look at the many activities in the field of interreligious dialogue in recent months we can see that there is a growing conviction that in the face of a growth of alleged religiously motivated terrorist activities, all religions are challenged to show that their religious traditions and teachings do not support or justify the use of violence in the name of religion. This rejection of violence can be found in many declarations of meetings and conferences between members of different religions during the last year. To be credible, these statements have to be bolstered by the admission of the historical truth that religions have been used in the past again and again to justify violence and religiously motivated wars. Religious lead- ers have to admit that their religious heritage has been abused and that crimes have been committed in the name of religion. Such an admission of guilt can help one be watchful and vigilant with a view to the future, and at the same time, to be humble when speaking of their own religious traditions and their capacity to pro- 228 TRENDS AND CONFERENCES vide guidance for the peaceful and harmonious co-existence of members of differ- ent religions in today’s religiously pluralistic world. There are quite a few areas for interreligious cooperation if the religious leaders and the simple faithful are ready to engage in working together and not against one another. A very important field is education, because by providing accurate information about one another’s religious tenets and traditions, the emergence of prejudices can be forestalled and a way to a true appreciation of other religious expressions and forms can be fostered. As studies of school textbooks in several countries have shown, there is still much misinformation, historical distortions and misleading information to be found in teaching material about the other reli- gions. It is often said that the most effective dialogue occurs on the level of every- day life among people of different faiths living and working together. This has been true for a long time in many Asian countries where people of mixed religious affiliations live side by side. But the growth of fundamentalist and extremist cur- rents in different religions has shown that the apparent harmony and understand- ing were rather fragile. Faced with agitation by radical elements that stress the dif- ferences between religious traditions, the common people do not have sufficient knowledge of the other traditions to see through the erroneous and hateful argu- ments of those who advocate separation, segregation and often violence. There- fore, it is most important that efforts be made to spread knowledge about the other religious traditions already during their education to provide sufficient informa- tion to resist the propaganda spread by radical elements. Another area of interreligious cooperation is in the social field in working for the improvement of life in urban and rural settings by pooling the resources and skills of different religious and cultural traditions. The work of the Asian Cultural For- um on Development (ACFOD), founded in 1973, is an early example of such co- operation. The series of seminars, under the name of “Faith Encounters in Social Action” (FEISA), organized by the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC), were born from the realization that reflection and exchange on religious topics with members of other religions should include common action in the so- cial area as well in order to become a force in bringing about change. There has been spontaneous cooperation on many occasions in the cases of natural calam- ities, e.g. in Myanmar, where the cyclone Nargis devastated vast areas in the Irra- waddy river delta in May 2008, killing more than 70,000 people. In a similar way, there were several examples of interreligious cooperation after the tsunami disas- ter in 2004 in Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. Again in Thailand, Buddhists and Christians are cooperating in caring for AIDS/HIV patients. At a conference in Sapporo which was held shortly before the G8 summit in Japan in July 2008, reli- gious leaders representing Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and Shintoism, directed an appeal to political leaders to cut down the expenses for the military and give 229 STUDIES IN INTERRELIGIOUS DIALOGUE 18 (2008) 2 the surplus money into an “Earth Fund” for protection of the environment and for the struggle against poverty. Crisis in Jewish Christian Dialogue? The open controversy between the Vatican and the Jewish community regarding the reformulation of a prayer in the Good Friday liturgy, which was published in February 2008 and used for the first time during the Good Friday services, has raised the question if the Catholic Church has truly changed its attitude towards the Jewish community. The Vatican—and for that matter Pope Benedict XVI— wanted to accommodate the small minority of traditionalists in the Catholic Church who demanded a new edition of the 1962 version of the Roman Missal in the Tridentine Order of the Mass for use in their liturgical celebrations, so that they could avoid using the new, post-conciliar, liturgy that they reject. The offen- sive part in the new prayer for the Jews on Good Friday is the passage where the hope is expressed “that God will illuminate [the Jews’] hearts so that they may recognise Jesus Christ as the Saviour of all people.” Several Jewish leaders and organizations reacted strongly to this new prayer formula which, in their inter- pretation, looks like a “return to the old anti-Semitic mindset” (so the Chief Rabbi of Milan), or as “a most regrettable step and potentially dangerous step back- wards” (so the new chairman of the General Rabbinical Conference, Henry G. Brandt). The Austrian Jewish community suspended all official dialogue with the Catholic Church in the aftermath of the publication of the prayer. Chief Rabbi Paul Chaim Eisenberg said that in the revised version of the prayer Judaism was regarded as a second-class faith and that the aim of the prayer was that the Jews might come to acknowledge Jesus as the Redeemer. Jewish representatives can- celled their participation in the national Catholic conference (Katholikentag), held May 22-25, 2008, in Osnabrück. It did not help much when Cardinal Walter Kasper, responsible for Jewish-Chris- tian relations in the Vatican, tried to defend the formulation of the prayer by stating that it was basically a quotation from the New Testament, namely from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 11, in which he speaks of God’s unbroken covenant with the Jews and not about missionary activity towards the Jews. Therefore, according to Kasper, the use of this text in the new prayer should not seen as an offence towards the Jews. Kasper’s declaration, however, did not resolve the issue, because the simple fact was that many Jews felt offended. The Vatican then felt obliged to provide a clarification published by the Vatican press office on April 4, 2008, in which it responded to the disappointment expressed by Jews who complained that the formulation of the Good Friday prayer was not in accordance with the official declarations and statements made by the Catholic Church in the aftermath of Vatican II. The Holy See tried to reassure the Jews that the new formulation of the prayer was in no way intended to change the position of the Catholic Church regarding the Jews. Again the expectation that this state- 230 TRENDS AND CONFERENCES ment would help clarify the “misunderstanding” proved to be wrong, because most Jewish critics did not accept it. Criticism also came from Catholic bishops and institutions involved in Jewish-Christian dialogue. The deputy head of the German Bishops’ Conference, Heinrich Mussinghoff of Aachen, for instance, declared publicly that the German bishops would have preferred that the wording of the 1970 edition of the Roman Missal had been retained, because it emphasized the Jews’ faithfulness to God’s covenant and the dignity of Israel. Beyond the debate sparked by the new prayer, in their Good Friday services the vast majority of Catholics continue to use the prayer as formulated in the missal published in 1970 during the pontificate of Paul VI.
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