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ROMA, February 2008 – Within one month, on March 4 and 5, there will be held in Rome the first meetings in preparation for the scheduled visit to the Vatican of a representative group of the 138 Muslim scholars who in October of 2007 addressed to the pope and to the heads of the other Christian confessions a letter with an offer of dialogue entitled "A Common Word Between Us and You."
The meetings will be held at the pontifical council for interreligious dialogue, presided by cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran. The schedule arranges for the Muslim representatives to meet with Benedict XVI and other Church authorities beginning next spring. And they will hold study sessions in institutes like the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, the PISAI, headed by Fr. Miguel Angel Ayuso Guixot.
The Muslim delegation will be composed of five Muslims scholars from as many nations:
– Ibrahim Kalin, from Turkey, director of the SETA foundation in Ankara and a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.;
– Abd al-Hakim Murad Winter, from England, a professor of Islamic studies at the Shaykh Zayed Divinity School of the University of Cambridge, and director of the Muslim Academic Trust of the United Kingdom;
– Sohail Nakhooda, from Jordan, director of "Islamica Magazine," an international magazine edited in the United States;
– Aref Ali Nayed, from Libya, a member of the Interfaith Program of the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, a former teacher at the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Malaysia, and at the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in Rome;
– Yahya Sergio Yahe Pallavicini, from Italy, imam of the al-Wahid mosque in Milan, president of the ISESCO council for education and culture in the West, and vice-president of the Islamic Religious Community of Italy, the COREIS.
All of these are part of the group of experts coordinated from Amman by Jordan's Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal, president of the al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought, the leading promoter of the letter of the 138 and the protagonist behind the exchange of events that took place in November and December with Benedict XVI, through cardinal secretary of state Tarcisio Bertone, in preparation for the future meetings.
Of the five, the best known among the Vatican authorities and experts are Aref Ali Nayed and Yahya Pallavicini.
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Uniting The World Under The Beast
US
.- John J. Myers, the Archbishop of Newark and Ecclesiastical Delegate for the Pastoral Provision, addressed the Anglican Use Conference in San Antonio on July 11. Describing his “awestruck” reaction to his first Anglican Use liturgy, he spoke of the efforts underway to expand the Anglican Use and the Pastoral Provision to “continuing Anglican communities.”
Controversies within the Anglican Communion and the Episcopal Church have encouraged Episcopalian bishops, clergy, and laity to seek reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church. Last September Jeffrey Steenson, the Episcopal Bishop of Rio Grande, New Mexico, resigned his office to become a Catholic.
Archbishop Myers in his lecture noted that modern ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Anglicans had been inaugurated during the historic meeting of Pope Paul VI and Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of Canterbury on March 23, 1966. Dialogue since that event has been “quite promising at times” and he said that it continues “because the Catholic Church believes that the Anglican Communion holds a special place in relationship to her.”
“Even though the relationship and dialogue seem strained at times we are obliged to continue to pray and work for unity, to ‘press toward the mark,’ so that the prayer of our Blessed Lord may be realized that all who profess faith in Him may be one,” he continued.
Until that unity is achieved, he said, the Pastoral Provision “serves somehow to close the gap.”
The Pastoral Provision, Archbishop Myers explained, is a means by which individuals from the Episcopal Church can be reconciled with the Catholic Church. It provides to Episcopalians who reconcile with Rome the option to worship in a manner familiar to them, “which many practiced from childhood and which has nourished their faith in Jesus Christ.”
For non-Episcopalians, he said, the Anglican Use provides the worship-enabling beauty of Anglican liturgical action, music, architecture and art. It has even helped Catholics whose practice of the faith lapsed because of liturgical abuses in the implementation of the Novus Ordo reform of the Mass after the Second Vatican Council.
Describing his own experience of the Anglican Use, Archbishop Myers said: “I was awestruck when I first experienced the Anglican Use liturgy at the English College in Rome during a pilgrimage last September. Its beauty was incarnated in the devotion manifested in the exquisite celebration of the Eucharist. I was humbled by the devotion of the faithful and I am encouraged by the fervor of the chapel and parishes that employ the Anglican Use liturgy here in the United States.”
“The Holy See, through the work of the Pastoral Provision, recognizes that there is a legitimate historical patrimony of the Anglican Communion,” he said, citing a sixth-century letter that Pope Gregory the Great sent St. Augustine of Canterbury which encouraged the pioneering evangelist of England to use the best customs of all the Churches in teaching the Catholic Church in England.
Archbishop Myers suggested that those who have benefited from the Pastoral Provision over its 28 years of existence should remember that it was granted “for an indefinite period of time” and presumes obedience to the Holy See.
“Catholic faithful who worship according to the Anglican Use must never see themselves as different from other Catholics or somehow privileged among other Christian Communions,” the bishop exhorted. “We are Catholics together, obedient to the Holy Father, to those bishops in communion with him and ever faithful to Magisterial teaching.”
Concerning the growth of the Anglican Use and the Pastoral Provision, Archbishop Myers said:
“We are working on expanding the mandate of the Pastoral Provision to include those clergy and faithful of ‘continuing Anglican communities.’ We are striving to increase awareness of our apostolate to Anglican Christians who desire to be reconciled with the Holy See. We have experienced the wonder of several Episcopal bishops entering into full communion with the Catholic Church and we continue to receive requests from priests and laity about the Pastoral Provision.”
Addressing those who have entered the Catholic Church from the Anglican Communion, Myers acknowledged the difficulties they have faced:
“I know that some of you experienced difficulty and anxiety at the time you made the decision to leave what was so dear to you when you felt the Lord calling you to come to the Catholic Church. In some regard your journey has been heroic. The Church is enriched by your struggles for our Lord.”
He noted that John Henry Cardinal Newman, a prominent nineteenth-century convert from Anglicanism who is being considered for beatification, also underwent such struggles. Bishop Myers then recited the entirety of Newman’s poem “Lead, Kindly Light,” whose first line reads “Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,/Lead Thou me on!”
Archbishop Myers closed his address with a prayer for Christian unity, saying “I ask your prayers as I continue to serve you and together may we assist in some small way, those from the Anglican Communion who seek reconciliation with the See of Peter. May the Light, which is Christ, enable those who are lost in the dark to see through the struggles and challenges of our time. May they know that only Christ can bring them ‘holy rest and peace at last’.”Italy
POPE: GOAL OF CHRISTIAN UNITY CLOSER
(AGI) - Vatican City, 25th January - When "Christians pray together", it is then that "the goal of unity seems closer" said Pope Benedict 16th, commenting on the contribution to ecumenism brought about by the Week of Prayer for Unity among Christians, which the Pope himself is to round off this afternoon when he presides at the solemn Vespers in the Basilica of St Paul outside the Walls. Speaking to the Mixed Working Group formed by members of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity and the Church Ecumenical Council, he said that from common prayer is born "a deep harmony between hearts and minds making us able to see events in a new way and to strengthen our determination and to overcome that which keeps us apart". In his address, the Pope expressed his gratitude for the 100 years of spiritual ecumenism which had radically changed the countenance - improving it - of dialogue between the different Christian creeds. "Gratitude towards those many persons - he continued - who over these 100 years have sought to spread the practice of spiritual ecumenism through common prayer, the conversion of hearts, and growth in communion".
Thanks for the "ecumenical movement", fed also by the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, but also open appreciation for a collaboration which has linked the Catholic Church and the World Council of Churches for over 40 years, and which "has offered - the Pope recognised - a stark expression of the communion which already exists between Christians". The Mixed Group, said Benedict 16th, "has been working assiduously to strengthen the "dialogue of life" which my predecessor, Pope John Paul II, used to call the dialogue of charity"
