Assisi III: what other speakers said

October 28, 2011

Several speakers joined Pope Benedict in addressing the hundreds of participants at the inter-religious pilgrimage for peace on October 27.

“We have entered a century in which ideologies would reduce the sense of human person, and distort the relationships with nature,” said Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. “The strong resource competition among peoples in a climate-constrained environment threatens to dissolve the fabric of human society and devastate the very order of creation which Francis of Assisi praised in his Canticle of the Sun.”

“Even today, 25 years after the first meeting called by Blessed John Paul II here in Assisi, ten years after the dramatic events of 11 September, and when the ‘Arab Spring’ has not put an end to the tension between peoples while the place of religion in the ferment taking place in the world remains ambiguous ... we must oppose the deformation of the message of religions and their symbols by the authors of violence,” said Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople.

“For the World Council of Churches a clear commitment over the coming years is to work for just peace in Jerusalem and all the peoples living there and around that city with Shalom – Salaamin its name,” added Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, secretary general of the World Council of Churches. “It is the city called and named to be a vision of peace, but which throughout history has so often become a place of conflict.”

Among the other speakers were Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist leaders, as well as agnostic Julia Kristeva.

 

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Further information:

• The world's religions commitment to peace (AsiaNews.it)
• Julia Kristeva: The humanism of the Enlightenment must dialogue with Christian humanism (AsiaNews.it)
• Assisi III: Terrorism is 'antithesis of religion,' Pope says (CWN, 10/27)