Inter-Religious Conferences Consider Contemporary Middle East

By the Reverend L. Humphrey Walz

February witnessed three gatherings in which Middle Eastern religious leaders confronted contemporary issues. A two day conclave in Istanbul to consider the ethical problems of seeking to solve international disputes by war attracted Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders from around the world. At meeting's end, participants declared: "We reject the concept that it is possible to justify one's actions in any armed conflict in the name of God."

Among further joint conclusions, according to the Ecumenical Press Service of Geneva, were statements that "A crime committed in the name of religion is a crime against religion" and "We stand firmly against those who violate the sanctity of human life and pursue policies in defiance of moral values."

The tri-faith conference focused on intercreedal aspects of violence, including "ethnic cleansing" in nearby Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. Time constraints prevented formulating joint recommendations to NATO, the U.N. or any government. Their final declaration was released over the signatures of Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomeos I of Istanbul; Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, president of the Vatican's Council on Peace and Justice; New York Rabbi Arthur Schneier of Appeal of Conscience; and Mehinet Yilmaz, Muslim president of the Turkish Office of Religious Affairs. The conference was called by the Eastern Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate and theNew York-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation.

Conference on Mideast Christianity

"A Celebration of Christianity in the Middle East," initiated by Evanston, IL-based Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding (EMEU), attracted a lively mix of 457 clergy and lay registrants to the First Baptist Church of Washington, DC. Of these, 236 were from Western "evangelical" congregations, 169 from "mainline" Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches, and 53 from Middle Eastern Christian bodies. The Rev. Dr. Donald Wagner of the Portland, OR-based Mercy Corps International, chief promoter of the conference, coordinated the program.

Supplementing the stellar cast of Arab, Armenian, European and American speakers announced in this column in the November/December issue of the Washington Report were Mrs. James Baker, wife of the former secretary of state, sociologist Dr. Tony Campolo, Brother Andrew of Open Doors (the Netherlands) and four bishops from Middle Eastern churches. All stayed on to address additional audiences totaling an estimated 5,000 persons in 25 local churches and seminaries. Most also participated the following day in a Howard University Divinity School theological symposium, which had been coordinated with the Conference of Christianity in the Middle East, and which attracted some 250 additional participants.

"A crime committed in the name of religion is a crime against religion."

Later, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University featured five of the speakers at a packed symposium on "Jerusalem and the Future of Arab Christianity." They were Elias Chacour, Melkite Catholic priest from Galilee and author of Blood Brothers and We Belong to the Land (both available through the AET Book Catalog on page 96 of this issue); Gabriel Habib, general secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches; Georges Khodr, Antiochian Orthodox Archbishop of Mt. Lebanon/Beirut; and Mrs. Jean Zaru, Palestinian lecturer at Selly Oaks Anglican Mission Training Center in Birmingham, England.

Speakers reached an additional audience at the House of Representatives Rayburn Office Building when Representative Tony Hall (D-OH) and Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) invited all of their congressional colleagues to a 90-minute informal hearing with Chacour, Habib and Nora Kort, program coordinator for Catholic Relief Services in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, and Jerusalem human rights attorney Jonathan Kuttab.

Some participants are illustrating their local reports by showing EMEU's documentary video, "That They May Be One; The Church and the Middle East," premiered at the Celebration. It is available for $24.95 from the Mercy Corps/EMEU joint Midwestern office, newly moved from Chicago's Loop to 847 Chicago Ave., #3 C, Evanston, IL 60202, telephone (7080 733-0901; fax 733-0904.

Conference on Modern Challenges

Some 450 religious leaders from over 97 countries attended the four-day Jewish/ Christian Jerusalem Conference on Modem Social and Scientific Challenges, according to the Jerusalem Post. Attendees included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican Secretariat for Doctrine and Faith; Anglican Archbishop George Carey; Dr. Lois Wilson of Canada, past co-president of the World Council of Churches; Rabbi Rene Sirat, president of the European Council of Rabbis; Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini; Dom Ivo Larscheiter, past president of the European Conference of Bishops; and Rabbi Henry Sobell, director of the Department of Interreligious Affairs of the Latin American Jewish Congress.

The Jerusalem Post headlined Rabbi Sirat's opening "blast" at political activities in the name of religion. As examples he cited the "Christian Democratic" parties of Western Europe, the Muslim political leadership in Iran and the "Israeli rabbis who dabble in politics."

Jerusalem Post writer Haim Shapiro reported opposition to the conference from Israel's past chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, and from Jerusalem Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Kolitz. The Post article also noted "attacks by Orthodox and haredi figures who argued that Jews have nothing in common with the Christian world and do not need to consult with others on how to behave. " (The haredi movement, embodied in the Agudath Israel political party, wants Israel to become a Jewish theocracy.) The Post reported also that Member of Knesset Avraham Ravitz of the United Torah Judaism political party challenged the whole concept of the conference by asking, "Who decided it is time to give legitimacy to Christians?"

The Israeli government's Religious Affairs Office joined the opposition to the Christian-Jewish conference. The Jewish Press of Brooklyn, NY printed an article by MK Rabbi Menachem Porush citing the possibility that Jews would convert to other religions as the basis for his resistance.

"Such meetings," he wrote, "can only lead to assimilation .... I am sorry and ashamed to state that even now there are tragic chapters in which many, many Jewish boys and, especially, girls have become lost to us in Arab villages. This is especially so among Jews who speak Arabic.

The Jerusalem chief rabbi's contention that "the whole concept of interdenominational dialogue is foreign to Judaism," however, brought sharp rebuttal from other Israeli Jews. Rabbi Ron Kronish, director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel, wrote a letter to the editor saying, "Perhaps it is foreign to Rabbi Kolitz and to his brand of Judaism, but it is not strange for thousands of Jews-including Reform, Conservative and Orthodox rabbis and lay persons around the world and in Israel-who, for many years, have been engaging in dialogue to try to understand other religions and other religious leaders."

"The main commitment must be to recognize that we are neighbors."

Such controversial social and ethical matters as genetic engineering, the quality of life, test-tube babies, abortion and euthanasia were considered in daily discussion groups. In the plenary sessions, religious leaders examined frankly some of the issues dividing Jews and Christians.

Without directly mentioning Israel's restraints on Christian missionary activity, Archbishop Carey said, "Genuine loving and sensitive evangelism is essentially an invitation to taste what I have tasted. I am compelled to share the wonder of Christ. " He said he was also compelled to listen to other believers and to be open to the possibility of himself being changed.

The main commitment of true religious leadership, Carey declared, must be "to recognize that we are neighbors, to act in a neighborly way toward each other and, as neighbors, to speak of the transcendant to those outside our number who are bound by a materialistic view of life."

Cardinal Ratzinger emphasized that Christians and Jews, united in forgiveness, "should become a force for peace in the world. " Such a new relationship of mutual understanding and acceptance can prosper in an atmosphere of shared faith in the one God who offers salvation to all humanity. The history of that relationship, he noted, has been one of "mistrust and hostility, but also—thank God—a history marked again and again by attempts at forgiveness, understanding and mutual acceptance. " As an example, he cited the new Catechism of the Catholic Church.

A surprise to many local Christians was the freedom of speech granted to Jerusalem Patriarch Michel Sabbah, leader of the region's Latin-rite Catholics and a spokesman for Palestinian Christians. He told participants that Christian-Jewish dialogue can only be effective where both accept each other as equals under God with the right to express their religious identity and live in freedom and security. "Only when neighbors relate truly to one another as neighbors, and not as enemies or suspicious strangers, can they determine and discuss a common agenda in improving mutual relations and for acting upon it."

A native of Nazareth, Sabbah said his life as a Catholic religious leader in the land of Jesus' birth had meant "dealing with a constant cycle of moral and physical violence, of daily anxieties and sufferings, heightened by intermittent wars among the Jewish and Palestinian peoples."

He called on conference participants to oppose extremists from all sides. They have intensified the Arab-Israeli conflict's "politicizing of existence" by identifying individuals only as members of a political, racial or religious group.

Resultant labels prevent people from seeing each other as "equally loved by God and equally called to salvation and to the fullness of life here in this land."

Some religious leaders were reluctant to attend because of puzzlement over why the Israeli government and/or B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League (ADL) should invest so heavily in this costly conference. Chief organizer and promoter of the conference Rabbi David Rosen, ADL director of interfaith relations in Israel, declared that the motivation for participation had been the need to familiarize religious leaders with the challenges from science and social change through contact with experts in those fields. He said he was pleased that the conference also brought together people with different perspectives to increase understanding both of the issues and of each other.

Co-sponsors were the Bamot Center, a secular think tank and the Tantur Ecumenical Institute.

Sudan Relief Funds Run Low

Helena Mayer of Lutheran World Federation (LWF) reports that lack of funds has suspended a cooperative church-run airlift of emergency aid to southern Sudan. Food supplies are available, she said, but cannot be transported by truck because roads have been clogged by troops of the Khartoum government.

The alternative is shipment by air. However, the Sudan Emergency Operations Consortium, a joint operation of (Catholic) Caritas Internationalis, the Lutheran World Federation and the World Council of Churches, has expended most of its available funds for air transport to the drought-ridden south. Caritas has sent supplementary funds but more will be needed to restart the airlifts from Nairobi, Kenya, to Akot, Kongor, and Juba in Sudan. These daily flights have been the only means of delivering emergency aid to millions of people cut off by the Khartoum government's dry-season offensive.

Bishop's Death Raises Suspicions

At the February funeral of Bishop Haik Hovsepian-Mehr in the Tehran Christian cemetery, 2,000 mourners heard a Roman Catholic priest hail the murdered Iranian Assemblies of God prelate as "a saint and a martyr." The bishop had worked tirelessly for the human rights of all minorities in Iran but especially of Christians, who have dwindled to about 10,000.

It was his sleuthing and reporting through British parliamentarian Anthony Coombs that had brought a U.N. investigator to the case of the Rev. Mehdi Dibaj, nine years on death row for "apostasy" (becoming a Christian).

Three days after Dibaj's consequent release from jail, the bishop "disappeared" on his way to meet visitors at Tehran airport. Ten days later the police summoned Hovsepian-Mehr's son to identify a photo of his father's battered remains. It took still longer to negotiate transfer of the body from an unmarked grave.

Although the police declared Bishop Hovsepian-Mehr the victim of "random street violence," conflicting evidence has caused suspicionthat this was, rather, an"execution" ordered by Iran's ayatollah dominated state security forces to stop his revelations of restrictions on religious freedom. Patrick Sookhdeo, head of the London-based International Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, says he has "no doubt" this was the case.

The Church of England newspaper in London comments that "the Iranian government is committed to stamping out Christianity. " It adds, however, that Iran's human rights problem goes far deeper than that, as indicated by executions of more than 95,000 political prisoners in the past 15 years. Middle East Watch, a New York-based human rights group, is among those pressing for a full-scale international investigation into both the bishop's death and Iran's treatment of Christians.

The Reverend L. Humphrey Walz, D. D., retired associate executive of the Presbyterian Synod of the Northeast, is active in ecumenical and peacemaking activities.