THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD
Don’t demonise North Africa’s Muslims, bishops warn
Tom Heneghanin Paris and Robert Mickens in Rome
AS UNREST in North Africa looked set to bring about major changes there and possibly across the wider Muslim world, church leaders meeting in Algiers warned that fears of an Islamist advance across the region were mis- placed. Christian minorities in the region were not as under threat as it sometimes appeared, they insisted. The nine Catholic bishops of North Africa, the arc of Muslim countries stretching from Mauritania to Libya, met in the Algerian cap- ital this week for an annual conference that was overshadowed by the fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and mass protests against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On Tuesday one million people marched in Cairo calling for his removal. The Archbishop of Rabat, Vincent Landel, president of the Bishops’ Conference of North Africa, warned against what he called a “mon- strous fear” in Europe that Islamists would take power and threaten Christian minorities. “Europeans have to see that a Muslim isn’t
a devil. Stop being afraid of fundamentalists,” he told the French service of Vatican Radio. “I can’t say what’s happening in Egypt or Iraq is an issue of Muslims against Christians. It’s about small groups of Muslims against some Christians, but there are also Muslims who have died and are dying every day.” The Tunisian Islamist leader Rachid Ghannouchi, who returned last week from 25 years in exile in Britain, “said there was
no question of forming an Islamist govern- ment. I think he even said that joining a government was not an issue,” the archbishop pointed out. “I maintain open and friendly relations with our Muslim brothers. I’m sure my brothers in Tunisia and Algeria do the same thing,” he said. Archbishop Landel said the bishops, almost all of foreign origin, could not take sides. “We’re nothing in these coun- tries,” he said. There are 25,000 Christians among Morocco’s 35 million population. Fr Justo Lacunza Balda, former rector of
the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, was more cautious because of the recent rise in violence against Christians in Muslim countries. The political stagnation in Arab countries that led to today’s political protests had also fostered religious extremism and violence there, “and it might get worse in the future”, he said.
Amid the push for change in Egypt, about 20 leading theologians, intellectuals and imams have issued a call to modernise Islam that includes demands for greater tolerance towards and rights for religious minorities. The Egyptian Jesuit Fr Samir Khalil Samir, one of the Vatican’s leading advisers on Islam, called the appeal “truly revolutionary” in an analysis on
Asianews.it. Meanwhile Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran
has expressed hope that the Cairo-based al- Azhar University may not suspend its decade-long dialogue with the Vatican but attend scheduled talks in Rome on Tuesday. “For the moment all of our appointments remain in force, including the one in February
Commission to hear Maciel’s abuse victims
THE LEGIONof Christ (LC), the scandal-stained religious order currently being reformed by the Vatican, has set up a special “outreach commission” for people who were harmed or sexually abused by the institute’s late and disgraced founder, Fr Marcial Maciel, writes Robert Mickens. The Legion announced on
Monday that the five-man commission, based in Rome, would “deal only with cases having a direct relation to the person” of Maciel and not, apparently, any cases
concerning other LC members. It said the commission would listen individually to people “requesting a response” from the Legion and would then give a “detailed written report” of each listening session to the papal delegate overseeing the reform of the conservative men’s order, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis. “With the help of his advisers, he will then make decisions about what the Legion of Christ should do in each case,” the LC statement said. The website “life-after-RC”
(that is, Regnum Christi, the Legion’s lay movement) complained that the Legionary priests on the commission – Mexican Frs Florencio Sánchez and Eduardo Robles-Gil – were Maciel loyalists. The latter heads the RC movement in Mexico City, while the former is a university chaplain in Madrid. Former RC members with grievances expressed concern that it would not be possible to air these to the commission. Two “outsiders” – a former magistrate and now canon lawyer from the Archdiocese of
Madrid, Fr Silverio Nieto Núñez, and a civil law professor from Mexico, Dr Jorge Adame Goddard – also join the commission. “To ensure objectivity and impartiality, Mgr Mario Marchesi, one of the papal delegate’s personal advisers, will lead it,” the statement added. “In so far as it is humanly possible, we want to close this chapter in its more painful aspects, seek reconciliation, and allow justice and charity to prevail,” said the LC general director, Fr Alvaro Corcuera.
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Sheikh Rachid Ghannouchi, head of the Ennahda movement, is welcomed on his arrival in Tunis on 30 January. Photo: Reuters/ Louafi Larbi
with our partners from Cairo,” said the car- dinal, who heads the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, in an interview pub- lished last Saturday in L’Osservatore Romano. The university said it was freezing the dia- logue because Pope Benedict XVI “interfered” in Egypt’s internal affairs when he publicly declared that authorities there and in other predominantly Muslim countries should give greater protection to Christians. But the office of Cardinal Tauran has not received a com- munication to that effect. The Vatican has remained silent on the mass protests in Egypt. However, the Custos of the Franciscans in the Holy Land, Fr Pierbattista Pizzaballa, told Vatican Radio on Sunday that they signalled “epochal changes” in the Arab world. “This is certainly a positive sign, but it’s also worrying because we don’t know how all this will end,” he said. The Coptic leader Pope Shenouda was reported last Sunday as having called Mr Mubarak to express his confidence in the president’s ability to “overcome the current circumstances”. (See Daniella Peled, page 4,
and Anthony O’Mahony, page 6.)
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