‘Christianity and Islam: at the service of brotherhood in a divided world’

The third edition of the event on the theme ‘Christianity and Islam: at the service of brotherhood in a divided world’, organized by the archdiocese, opens this evening in Croatia. Young Muslim theologians and teachers are taking part for the first time. On 16 July, Sister Becquart, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, spoke on ‘Synodality, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue’.
Alessandro Di Bussolo – Vatican City

The theme of dialogue with Islam for the construction of a fraternal world is at the centre of the third edition of the Rijeka Mediterranean Theological Meetings, which opened on 14 July, in the Domus Laurana pastoral house, in Lovran, on the Croatian Adriatic coast. Among the 38 students and doctoral students in theology present until 20 July, in this Kvarner tourist resort, there will be nine Muslims for the first time, as among the five lecturers there will be the Islamic theologian Benjamin Idriz, imam of Penzberg in Germany. Fifteen will be Orthodox students, eight Catholics and six Protestants, mostly from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also from Greece, France, Austria and Germany.

Work will get underway on Monday morning with the introductory address by the Archbishop of Rijeka-Flume Mate Uzinić, promoter of the Meetings together with an organizing group of theologians and biblical scholars, on the theme “Christianity and Islam: at the service of brotherhood in a divided world”. A message from Judge Mohamed Abdelsalam, secretary general of the Zayed Prize for Human Brotherhood and witness to the dialogue that led to the historic signing, on 4 February 2019 in Abu Dhabi, of the Document on Human Brotherhood for World Peace and Common Coexistence, by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, will also be read out.

Each morning, from Tuesday to Friday, there will be a lecture by the five lecturers, who in the afternoon will explore the various aspects of the topic in greater depth with the students, coordinating as many working groups. The first speaker will be Croatian theologian Tomislav Kovač, head of the Department of Fundamental Theology at the Catholic Faculty of Theology in Zagreb. He will be followed by Benjamin Idriz, imam and theologian of the Islamic community of Penzberg in Germany, and the Greek Orthodox theologian Angeliki Ziaka, professor of religious studies and head of the Islamic Studies Commission at the Faculty of Theology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. And the Meetings will conclude with lectures by Protestant theologian Ulrich Schmiedel, professor of global Christianity at the University of Lund in Sweden, and Zilka Spahić-Šiljak, professor of gender studies and academic director of the University Gender Resource Center (UNIGeRC) at the University of Sarajevo.

There will be two public meetings during the week. The first, on the evening of Tuesday 16 July, will be with Sister Nathalie Becquart, undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops, on the theme ‘Synodality, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue’. She has many years’ experience of Christian-Muslim dialogue in France, especially with young people. The second, on the evening of Wednesday 17 July, will see the five lecturers discuss the theme of the Mediterranean Theological Meetings, in a round table in the conference hall of the Rijeka archbishopric.

Uzinić: two faiths that can work for fraternity
In an interview with the Bosnian website Polis.ba, Archbishop Mate Uzinić emphasized that dialogue between Christians and Muslims, especially on the theological level, can help the two communities of believers “to stop being a cause of division, in order to be at the service of fraternity”. But to dialogue “it is necessary to find interlocutors”, as Pope Francis found in the great Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb and his theology, and this in the Pope and his reflections”. With the choice of the theme for this third edition of the Meetings, explains Uzinić, “we want to encourage the theology students of our Region, burdened by divisions and hatred, to find interlocutors in each other. And to start building a better world, without divisions, also in the Balkans’.

Not borders but bridges, dialogue is never a danger
Meetings such as the one opening today in Lovran, according to the archbishop of Rijeka, can convey to Christians and Muslims the message ‘that dialogue with members of other religious communities does not endanger us, that by speaking with others we do not renounce ourselves, that this does not mean religious syncretism, but that this dialogue, which helps us get to know others, actually encourages us to be even better, more authentic ourselves’.
Without this openness and dialogue, for Monsignor Uzinić, ‘others are a threat to us, they make us afraid, they are our enemies. The result is closure, and very often religious fundamentalism, which leads us to become enemies of others.
And indeed, then we are enemies both of ourselves and of our religion that we think we are defending’. The borders and obstacles we place between us, he concludes, ‘will not and cannot save us, but the bridges we want to build between us can and will. Dialogue is one of these bridges’.