Angelo Scola - eng vers » israel singer

Jews, Muslims and Christians talk about God. Scola and Oasis at the UN in New York

ufficiostampa — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 09:07:26 +0000

On February 2007 cardinal Scola has met Rabbi Israel Singer and Seyyed Hossein Nasr at a forum sponsored by the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations. Here’s the article appeared in the National Catholic Register by Pete Sheehan.

NEW YORK – Despite difficulties, Christianity, Islam and Judaism can work together for peace, but only by each remaining faithful to its own beliefs.
That’s the view of leaders and scholars from the three religions who shared a podium at a Jan. 17 forum at the United Nations. “We live in a desert,” amid the growing secularism, religious divisions, and other conflicts that plague the world, said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, author and professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, one of the panellists. “The words ofJesus Christ, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ were at no time as true as today.”
Religion can help foster that peace, “but only if it continues to be religion,” remaining faithful to its own identity, the Iranian-born Nasr said. “We must not relativize our path to God, but we must accept the validity of other paths.
Nasr spoke along with Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, and Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress, and the Venice, Italy-based Oasis International Studies and Research Center.
About 200 people filled the United Nations’ Dag Hammarskjöld Library, Auditorium for the forum, which was held to introduce the work of the Oasis Center and its publications. Oasis, a bi-annual magazine that deals with issue of Christian, Muslim and other interfaith concerns, is being given a U.S. editions for the first time.
The Jan. 17 forum included the three “Abrahamic” religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Cardinal Scola founded the Oasis Center and its journal to forster dialogue among Christians and Muslims, beginning with Christian communities living in Muslim countries.
In addressing the audience, Cardinal Scola emphasized the need for dialogue beyond scholarly circles to included individuals in their daily lives.”Listen to the experiences of people”, he urged.
Father James Massa. director of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, who met Cardinal Scola when he was in Washington the previous day, called Oasis a “marvellous instrument” that offers was to “bridge the divides” between Catholics and Muslims.
Fahter Massa noted that the name comes from a comment by Pope John Paul II that “the place of prayes is dear to both Christians and Muslims ad an oasis in which one meets with the merciful God along the walk toward eternal life and with one’s brothers and sisters in the bonds of religion.”
Carl Anderson, supreme knight of the Knights of Columbus and who works closely with the Oasis Cener, moderated the panel.

‘Misunderstandlngs’

Nasr noted that “many profound misunderstandings need to be overcome,” especially the miss-association between Islam and violence.
Both Islam and Christianity have, at different times in their history, practiced violence “in the name of religion,” he said. While Judaism has less of a record of violence, “for most of its history ii hasn’t had the power” to inflict violence.
“You can’t compare your favourable periods with the unfavorable periods of other religions” or confuse the influence of religion with the influence of the civilization in which a people of faith live, Nasr said.
In understanding the differences in history and theology of each religion. “the freedom to be oneself,” and not be subject to coercion, whether military or economic.
While recognizing the differences among the three religions, Nasr said, “Look at how much they have in common. They all believe in the same God”, as well as “the beginning and end of human history, the immortality of the soul and responsibility for one’s actions before God.”
“Let up hope and pray that all those who believe in God, in his mercy and his wisdom” Nasr continued, “will be able to speak together as a single family in a world so alienated from the divine.”
Rabbi Singer also shared that hope for all religions. He found encouragement from the closer relationship between the Church and Judaism since the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 document Nostra Aetate (The Relation of the Church to better relations with Judaism. Yet dialogue between Jews and Catholics went far beyond what was imagined in Nostra Aetate, Singer said.
He cited the leadership of Pope John Paul II for fostering the healing. Jewish-Catholic dialogue can be a model for reconciliation, he said.
“If Jews and Catholics can get along,” Singer said, “almost anything can happen.”
Singer praised Islamic figures who have denounced violence, in particular Shaykh Ali Gomaa, Grand Mufti in Egypt and one of the highest-ranking clarics in e Sunni Muslim world.
The rabbi read a statement in which Ali Gomaa repudiated violence committed in the name of Islam as “the actions of e misguided criminal minority” who “contradict the central theme of peace in Islam.”

Unusual experience at the UN: talks about Faith and Religions. An article about the public Presentation of Oasis in NY

ufficiostampa — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 09:34:02 +0000

It is a rather unusual experience for the headquarters of the United Nations in New York to have a Muslim academic, a Rabbi and a Cardinal of the Catholic Church meet to speak about faith and the public role of religions. But such were the contents of the event that involved the presentation of the review Oasis which took place at the Palace of Glass on Wednesday 17 January 2007. The meeting, which went under the title ‘Peoples and Religions’, was opened by Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Permanent Observer of the Holy See at the United Nations. Prof. Carl A. Anderson, a Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus then introduced the three speakers: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a lecturer in Islamic studies at the George Washington University; Israel Singer, the President of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress; and Angelo Scola, the Patriarch of Venice. The conclusions to the meeting were entrusted to Dr. Roberto Fontolan, the editor of Oasis.

The conference hall, which was filled to the brim with over two hundred people who came to listen – ambassadors, intellectuals, journalists and the merely curious -, found itself face to face with an unexpected consonance between the three speakers, in particular in relation to certain ideas: for example, emphasis on the limitations of declaration of principles which remain only abstract because they are not based on historical reality. ‘Can religious experiences to a certain extent obviate these limitations so as to increase their capacity for social construction and this so as to become protagonists of a suitable promotion of human rights?’, Cardinal Scola asked, ‘I believe that one can give a positive answer to this question. One is dealing here with thinking about relationships between historical subjects that are really at work in our societies, amongst which religions stand out for their singular importance, and the criteria for their possible co-existence’. ‘Here’, continued the Patriarch of Venice, ‘it seems to me to be of fundamental importance to recognise the fact that the humanum as such (the universal dimension) is always and only present in the concrete lives of men and communities (the particular dimension). Thus each community of men, with the cultural expressions that characterise it, is an expression of the universal humanum but it is such in the historically determined cultural forms that are specific to it. Thus the anthropologically structural conditions of a culture are involved which are universal but which live in historical and communal actuations that are always particular’.

Professor Nasr also warned against the danger of establishing a single model for development as a basis for the assessment and evaluation of every expression of the human. This Muslim academic, who on more than one occasion cited Dante with admiration, after being questioned about the current situation in Iran, his homeland, emphasised how intense and little known about is the intellectual debate within Iran and how equally unknown remain those episodes and declarations that express the moderate and majority face of Islam. It was specifically one of these examples that was taken up by Rabbi Singer who read a part of the recent declaration of the Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gom’a, who condemned violence as irreconcilable with the Islam religion and used very severe phrases in relation to terrorists. For the President of the Policy Council of the World Jewish Congress, the experience of Oasis, which he has been following for some time, is as surprising in its pathway of growth as the pathway of Christian-Jewish dialogue has been over the last thirty years, which, indeed, has gone beyond every expectation.
The question that underlay the whole meeting was taken up by the Patriarch at the end of his paper: ‘how can men of religions address this fascinating task of social construction in a critical accompanying of the process of the hybridisation of civilisations and cultures? The route that I humbly take the liberty of proposing is that which saw the birth of the review Oasis and the Centre that promotes it. We may identify it in the subject of witness, understanding this category in all its theoretical and practical force. Witness calls on every man and every woman, inviting them to put themselves forward, to pay in person, and not to decide beforehand the point one can reach through encounter and dialogue with another person. No man can withdraw from witness because of the risk implied by freedom which can never be defined a priori. Human freedom can never be ‘deduced’, its full meaning only emerges in the act that performs it’.
‘Oasis’, the Patriarch declared, ending his paper, ‘wants to follow roads marked by witness, They are not completely identifiable a priori. For this reason Oasis is a building site that is always open’.