Vatican newspaper: Pope’s Syria peace appeal may launch ‘real dialogue’ with Islam
November 13, 2013
In an essay published in L’Osservatore Romano, Italian journalist Zouhir Louassini lauded How to Cure a Fanatic, a short work by Israeli writer Amos Oz, and said that Oz’s work can help one understand the positive response of many Muslims to Pope Francis.
The “vast majority of Muslims,” wrote Louassini, responded positively to the Pope’s appeal for peace in Syria because they recognize his “international spiritual leadership.”
In “globalizing fundamental values” – “peace, justice, love” – rather than waving a “political flag” or discussing “religious dogma,” Pope Francis, said Louassini, has laid the groundwork for “a real dialogue between Christianity and Islam. Dialogue in which the key word is the one indicated by [Amos] Oz: compromise. And there is no better compromise than to defend human dignity, trying to see in the other all that unites, rather than insisting on what separates.”
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Posted by: jg23753479 -
Nov. 13, 2013 7:21 AM ET USA
I'd like to believe that the problem is one of good will or lack of same on the part of Muslims, but I know too much about Islam to do so. No amount of "dialogue" will ever change the disdain for non-Muslims that underlies that religion's basic documents, especially the Koran. The sad fact is that the ''best'' Mohammedans are precisely the those who wage war against the kafir, i.e. non-believers like you and me. Far from seeing them as an anomaly, Islam deems them heroes.
