Georgetown scholar: Muslims comfortable in dialogue with Catholics
ICC Note
Any dialogue between Muslims and Christians should address the plight of Christians that are persecuted in Muslim countries.
By Chris Herlinger
08/04/2008 Islam (CNS)-Roman Catholics can play an important role in burgeoning and, by nearly all accounts, needed efforts in dialogue between Christians and Muslims, said a noted Catholic scholar of Islamic studies.
"Muslims say they're comfortable dialoguing with Catholics" because of the church's steadfast positions on questions such as family, abortion and bioethics, said John Esposito, director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington.
Esposito, 68, participated in a just-completed conference of Christians and Muslims held at Yale University in New Haven . Conference participants hoped to improve interfaith relations frayed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the U.S.-led war in Iraq .
A 2006 speech by the pontiff that cited medieval criticism of Islam sparked a furor among many Muslims and was one of the reasons 138 Islamic scholars and theologians, stating the need for international security and peace, penned a letter in the fall of 2007 on the need for interfaith understanding.
The Islamic scholars' letter, "A Common Word Between Us," prompted a formal response from Christian scholars at Yale Divinity School that eventually was signed by hundreds of Christian leaders, clerics and theologians, and has now turned into a formal process of dialogue that began with the Yale meeting and will continue through 2009 with a series of conferences, including one at Georgetown University next March.
Journalists covering the Yale conference were sometimes frustrated by what seemed to be a lack of concrete outcomes from the event -- though one outcome was a clear call for Christian and Muslim clerics to speak publicly during a designated week each year in praise of the other's tradition.
Esposito, a veteran of such conferences, said while the results of such interfaith meetings are often hard to gauge the process under way should be respected. He cited the often-quoted line about religious leaders: " Rome moves slowly."
He said in the early days of interfaith discussions there was much talk of tolerance.
"Some say that is now dead," Esposito said, adding "that in a globalized world respect has to be based not merely on tolerance but on equality."
