Faith Leaders meet in Naples

Pope to meet with world religious leaders at peace conference in Naples
The Associated Press
Published: October 20, 2007

Pope Benedict XVI meets Sunday with religious leaders from around the world — Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Zoroastrians — who are gathering for an annual peace conference in the southern city of Naples.

Benedict won't be participating in the three-day conference but timed a one-day visit to Naples to coincide with it. He will meet with the religious leaders ahead of its start, organizers said.

Among those expected to attend are the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams; one of Israel's chief rabbis, Yona Metzger; Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians; several Muslim academics and the political adviser to the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, Sheik Mohammed Rashid Kabbani.

Benedict has made reaching out to other faiths — particularly Muslims and Jews — a priority of his pontificate.

The Naples meeting comes more than two decades after Pope John Paul II invited world religious leaders to the hillside town of Assisi, birthplace of peace-loving St. Francis, for the first such World Day of Prayer for Peace.

That Oct. 27, 1986 prayer meeting — attended by the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and a host of interfaith leaders — prompted grumbling from within the Vatican that the event suggested that the Catholic Church considered all religious traditions equally valid.

Benedict — then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog — was among those opposed to the meeting and simply didn't show up, Italian news reports have said. He did attend a repeat prayer day hosted by John Paul in Assisi in 2002, the reports said.
Organizers contended there was nothing unusual about Benedict's lack of participation with the other religious leaders at the Naples conference, noting that over two decades John Paul only participated in the two or three peace meetings that he himself sponsored.

"There is nothing to explain," said Mario Marazziti, spokesman of the Sant'Egidio Community, the lay Catholic organization that is organizing the meeting. "What's more, the pope this time will meet with the religious representatives."

Marazziti said the choice of Naples was particularly significant to host this year's conference, whose theme is "For a world without violence: religions and cultures in dialogue."

"Naples is a city that knows well the weight of violence," he said. "Not only the problem of violence and killings, but the violence that is today a dimension of daily life that all big cities of the world must deal with."

During the conference, religious and political leaders — including the presidents of Tanzania and Ecuador — will participate in more than 30 panel discussions on topics as diverse as AIDS, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, faith and science and Islam and peace.

Religion should not be used for hate, says Pope
By Malcolm Moore in Naples
22/10/2007

Pope Benedict XVI and Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, yesterday condemned the use of religion to justify violence.

Not everyone in Naples was pleased to see Pope Benedict XVI
"In a world wounded by conflicts, where violence is committed in God's name, it is important to repeat that religion should not be a vehicle of hatred," said the pope to an audience of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews and Zoroastrians.

The 200-strong audience included the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Yona Metzger, Ayatollah Sayed Mohammed Mousavi Bojnourdi of Iran, and Bartholemew I, the ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church.

U Uttara, a Burmese monk and Din Syamsuddin, the president of Indonesia's Muslim Council, were also guests at a three-day conference in Naples to promote peace, organised by the Sant' Egidio community. Sant' Egidio, a lay Catholic organisation, has been praised by President George Bush, among others, for its work on conflict resolution.

"Bad religion is a very powerful tool for bad people to use against each other, because it carries with it some of that absolutism that is rooted in a rather insecure kind of faith," said Dr Williams. "It is all the more important that good religion comes to drive it out, you cannot do it just by secularism," he added.

The two men called upon the world's religious leaders to offer their "precious resources to build a peaceful humanity". Earlier in the day, the Pope and the Archbishop embraced before an open-air mass in the main square of the city.

Pope Benedict was making the first papal trip to Naples for almost 30 years. He took the opportunity to denounce the city's "disgraceful" mafia, the Camorra.

"The sad phenomenon of violence does not stop with the lamentable number of crimes committed by the Camorra, but also becomes part of the mentality, insinuating itself into social life, both in the centre of the city and in new and faceless suburbs," said the pope. "The risk is that young people fall into it," he warned.

Naples is one of Italy's most violent cities, and there were calls for the army to be sent in last year to calm a gang war between warring Camorra factions. However, not everyone in Naples was pleased to see Benedict. Slogans proclaiming "Death to the pope" have been daubed on the city's walls in the past few weeks.

Dr Williams added that he hoped to use the conference to start finding a "common Christian response" to a letter sent to the Pope by 138 Muslim scholars on the one-year-anniversary of Benedict's controversial speech at Regensberg University.

The letter, sent on October 13, called for Christianity and Islam to unite in peace and love. "I would like to try to get a response which involved some proper face-to-face discussions," said Dr Williams.