04/09/2006

Pope appeals to religious leaders to use their faiths to bring about peace.

Pope Benedict XVI said Monday that religion should never be used as a justification for war and appealed to hundreds of religious leaders to use their faiths to bring about peace.

"No one is therefore permitted to use the motive of religious difference as a reason or pretext for bellicose behavior toward other human beings," Benedict said in a message that was read to 200 religious leaders of different faiths meeting in this central Italian town for a summit held every year since Pope John Paul II started it 20 years ago.

In the message, read by Bishop of Assisi Domenico Sorrentino, Benedict recognized that religion had sometimes been used to justify war, but said that such violence is not caused by faith itself but "by the cultural limits with which it is lived and with which it develops in time."

The pontiff said people had hoped that the fall of the Berlin wall would usher in a time of peace, "unfortunately this dream of peace did not come through. On the contrary, the third millennium began with scenarios of terrorism and violence that are showing no sign of waning."

The two-day "International Meeting and Prayer for Peace" features dozens of religious figures joined by politicians, journalists and academics leading discussions on how to end conflicts and improve dialogue between cultures and religions.

Participants in the summit in the town where St. Francis lived and began preaching his message of peace include Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, Christians and Shintoists.

Yona Metzger, one of Israel's chief rabbis, said the meeting was a chance to build bridges during a time when some religious figures engage in "abuse of religion ... using sermons to incite and cause further bloodshed."

He appealed to religious leaders to work for the release of all those held captive in the recent Middle East fighting or at least to obtain information on their condition.

Addressing the summit's opening session in Hebrew, Metzger condemned as "disrespectful" the cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad published earlier this year in Western media.

"At the same time I expect Muslim religious leaders to condemn any leader of a Muslim country who mocks the Holocaust and calls for a state's obliteration," he said in a reference to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inflammatory rhetoric.

Ahmad al-Tayyeb, rector of Cairo's Al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam's most important seat of learning, echoed the pope's appeal to use religion as an instrument of peace.

"When the guides of humanity and the builders of human history turn their backs on religions and on their sublime philosophies, they become like a group of blind people who are incapable of guiding themselves, let alone others," al-Tayyeb said speaking in Arabic.

The summit will end late Tuesday, when prayers for world peace will be held across town, followed by a procession converging on the square in front of the St. Francis Basilica.

Discussion panels to be held during the meeting will focus on poverty and conflict around the world, but will also address specific crises, including the future of Lebanon after the recent war.

Also on the schedule are reflections on the forum's 20th anniversary and on the legacy of John Paul, a pontiff who frequently reached out to other faiths and held the first "World Day of Prayer for Peace" in October 1986, when he gathered with leaders from non-Christian religions in Assisi.

Organized by the Sant'Egidio Community, a Rome-based lay Catholic group that mediates world conflicts, the usually annual meeting has doubled up this year. It was held in April in Washington, D.C., the first time the forum was held in the United States, and is gathering again in Assisi to celebrate the anniversary.