Pope Francis and the grand imam of one of the most important Sunni Muslim institutions embraced at the Vatican on Monday, five years after the imam broke off relations with the papacy.
“The meeting is the message,” the Pope told Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar University, as the religious scholar came through the door of the papal library.
Al-Tayeb’s visit was the first meeting between a pontiff and a grand imam since the Muslim university in Cairo suspended talks in 2011. Al-Azhar froze relations after Benedict XVI called for better protection of Egypt’s Christian minority.
Al-Azhar claimed that Pope Benedict had offended Islam and Muslims by focusing only on the suffering of Christians when many Muslims were suffering as well.
Monday’s meeting came about after Bishop Miguel Ayuso Guixot, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, delivered a letter to al-Tayeb from Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, council president, inviting him to the Vatican.
Fr Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, said the Pope spoke privately with al-Tayeb for 25 minutes and the conversation included a discussion about “the great significance of this new encounter within the scope of dialogue between the Catholic Church and Islam”.
Fr Lombardi said the leaders discussed a “common commitment of the authorities and the faithful of the great religions for world peace, the rejection of violence and terrorism [and] the situation of Christians in the context of conflicts and tensions in the Middle East as well as their protection.”
Mission to convert Muslims includes jihadis, says cardinal
Christians have a mission to convert all Muslims, a senior Vatican official has said.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, made the comments at an interfaith meeting held at Cambridge University’s Woolf Institute.
Cardinal Koch also said that Christians should not try to convert Jews and should view Judaism as a “mother”.
“We have a mission to convert all non-Christian religions’ people, [except] Judaism,” he said, before reportedly adding that this extended to jihadis responsible for persecuting Christians in the Middle East.
The cardinal said: “It is very clear that we can speak about three Abrahamic religions but we cannot deny that the view of Abraham in the Jewish and the Christian tradition and the Islamic tradition is not the same.
“In this sense we have only with Jewish people this unique relationship that we do not have with Islam.”
The cardinal also said that Catholics should learn from Jews about how to observe the Sabbath.
Sunday culture was “very weak” in Christianity, he said.
Cuba’s new archbishop: I’m scared
God’s ways can be mysterious and sometimes frightening, but faith means trusting God, the new Archbishop of Havana has said.
Archbishop Juan Garcia Rodriguez told a huge congregation including communist officials at Havana’s cathedral: “You will understand that I’m scared. I do not understand the mystery of why I’m here or why the Holy Spirit chose me.”
He added that, still, “the Lord chose me and will not let me down”.
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