Vatican-Islamic commission issues joint call to combat secularization
June 26, 2013
Following a meeting in Rome last week, a joint Islamic-Catholic dialogue commission issued a statement affirming the need for the faithful of both religions to oppose secularizing trends in society and to provide help for the poor.
The commission—co-chaired by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, and Hamid bin Ahmad Al-Rifaie, the president of the International Islamic Forum for Dialogue—also condemned the continuing bloodshed in Syria and issued a call for international leaders to “do everything possible” under international law to stop the fighting.
In its statement, the joint commission affirmed: “that Christianity and Islam affirm the inseparability and complementarity between the material and the spiritual domains and that our responsibility as believers is to reconcile these dimensions of life; that many people today suffer from the loss of spiritual and religious roots, a phenomenon that weakens both the inner and moral dimensions of individuals and societies; and that the world today is facing many kinds of crises.”
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