ECUMENISM AND DIALOGUE
An occasion to “share our common concerns at the start of the third millennium, and re-affirm our common commitment to contribute with renewed vigour and confidence to an intercultural and inter-religious dialogue at the service of an integral humanism”. That, according to Cardinal Paul Poupard, President of the Pontifical Councils of Culture and Religious Dialogue, is the sense of the world summit of the representatives of the great religions that opened in Moscow on 3 July (it will end on 5 July). Cardinal Poupard, who forms part of the delegation of the Holy See – invited to attend the Summit by the Patriarch of Moscow, Alexei II, and led by Cardinal Walter Kasper, President of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity – addressed the meeting and thanked “Patriarch Alexei II and the Inter-Religious Council of Russia for this important initiative”. Poupard then underlined “the irreplaceable role of religions in the creation of more just societies in which harmony and peace would reign”. He also re-affirmed “the common will to reinforce dialogue between the religions and with the political and civil authorities, in the consciousness of the responsibilities of each”. The cardinal also described the challenges linked to the “growing phenomenon of globalization”, emphasizing that “the fundamental objective remains the same: constructing a city worthy of man” and “ensuring that the men and women of our time do not renounce the universal human values”. He also expressed concern about “the attitude of political systems, primarily focused on economic power to the detriment of justice and solidarity” and about “the crisis of values widespread in whole sections of the world population”. Poupard also deplored the “inhuman application of particular developments in science and technology”. “These too are challenges that require urgent and fully human responses”, he said. The cardinal then touched on the contribution that religions can make “to the development and safeguard of the cultural heritage of humanity”: “In a world of peaceful co-existence and the exchange of cultural riches, religions are open houses that may teach and practice dialogue, respect for differences, the dignity of the person, and love for truth… History shows that the Church, through her own moral and religious teaching, actively contributes, in an extraordinary way, to the growth of social cohesion”. Lastly, Cardinal Poupard summed up the position of the Catholic Church towards the separation between State and Church: “In her desire to honour the modern requirement of the rightful secularism of the State in all its religious and secular components, but cautious about a reductive form of secularism implicit in particular political tendencies, the Holy See re-affirms the willingness and capacity of religions to contribute to the construction of human communities, offering her own assistance especially in finding remedies to the challenge of social disintegration, while at the same time offering an ideal to the young and a meaning to life and to history”.
