Vatican City, Feb 28, 2017 / 06:02 am (CNA).- Not only is there a good deal in common between Muslims and Christians, but Catholics are called to respect and work together with those who practice the Muslim faith in recognition of truth and goodness they do possess, said Islam scholar Fr. Thomas Michel.
Fr. Michel, who holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Theology and worked under Pope John Paul II as head of the Vatican Office for Relations with Muslims, told CNA that Benedict XVI, like both St. John Paul II and Pope Francis, have all repeated the same message regarding Muslims – that of the Second Vatican Council.
“The document Nostrae aetate says that the Church has ‘esteem’ for Muslims,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we should just tolerate Muslims or put up with Muslims. ‘Esteem’ means to try to see what people have that’s good and appreciate them for that.”
The major “common point” between Christianity and Islam, Fr. Michel said, is that both faiths believe in the existence of only one God, and that both are trying to do what this one God wants.
Therefore, “how can we be enemies with people who are also, like us, trying to worship the one God?” he said. “Since the time of the Second Vatican Council, we’ve seen that part of our work as Christians is to be in dialogue with people of other faiths.”
“And this means not only talking to them and listening to them, but it also means cooperating with them, working together with them for good.”
This dialogue, Fr. Michel emphasized, isn’t just about making peace with each other, although that is important, but is about “the kind of world we live in” and how that makes it important that we all come to know each other better.
Fr. Michel noted that when the Fathers of the Council taught us, they didn’t deny the past conflict and tension between Catholics and Muslims, but they did say that it is in the past, and “what we have to do now is work together for the common good.”
The document Nostrae aetate is the declaration on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions from the Second Vatican Council, promulgated by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965.
Fr. Michel referenced a part of the document that says that the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.”
“The Church, therefore,” it continues, “exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.”
Four ways we can collaborate with Muslims or those of other faiths, Fr. Michel said, is by together working to build peace, and to promote social justice, “true human values,” and “true human freedom.”
A Jesuit, Fr. Thomas Michel has lived and worked among Muslims himself for many years, particularly in Turkey. He first went to Indonesia, joining the order’s Indonesia Province, in 1969.
Fr. Michel worked in the Vatican under Pope John Paul II from 1981-1994 as head of the Office for Relations with Muslims. From 2013-2016 he taught religious studies at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University in Doha, Qatar.
For 2016-2017, Fr. Michel joined the teaching staff at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies in Rome, where he gave a lecture Feb. 23.
His lecture on Contemporary Islam, titled “A Christian Encounter with Said Nursi’s Risale-i Nur,” gave a Christian analysis of the Risale-i Nur Collection, an interpretation on the Qur’an written by Bediuzzaman Said Nursi between the 1910s and 1950s in Turkey.
Summing up the teachings in what is a 6,000 page collection, Fr. Michel told CNA that Nursi “was trying to help Muslims live their faith in a lively way in modern terms.”
“He said you don’t have to live in the past, you don’t have to have nostalgia for earlier times.” The idea Nursi tried to convey, Fr. Michel explained, is that modernity is not the enemy of faith, “but a patient in need of the spiritual medicine faith provides.”
Nursi said, according to Fr. Michel, that “our enemies aren’t this group of people or that group of people.” Instead, he said our enemies are ignorance, poverty and disunity. And these are not only the enemies of Muslims, but of everyone.
Fr. Michel said that Nursi taught that to fight these common enemies everyone must work together, using both faith and reason.
According to Fr. Michel, there are somewhere around 5-12 million people who try to live the Qur’an according to the teachings of Nursi, depending on how you measure the level of commitment.
The majority of these Muslims are in Turkey, but some can be found in central Asia, places in Europe and even in the U.S. It isn’t a formal movement per se, but some people devote their lives to studying Nursi’s teachings and others try to study it in the midst of living their normal lives, he said.
If worried about Islamic extremists or that the Muslim religion will overwhelm Christian values in Western society, Fr. Michel said to try to remember that in the case of refugees, they “want the same things that normal Americans want.”
They want “to raise their children to be good God-fearing people, and to have a life, to have a job, to enjoy simple enjoyments. They’re no different than we are,” he said.
He said that in his experience, those who have negative attitudes about Muslims have only experienced the religion through TV or the newspaper, but that those “who know Muslims…have a very different attitude.”
“I’ve lived among thousands of Muslims…The people that I’ve lived with in many different countries, they go from birth to death, and from children to grandchildren, and there’s no violence in their lives,” he said.
“The average Muslim sees Islam as a religion of peace.”
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It was good of him to apologize, but I can’t fault him for smacking her hand. She nearly pulled him off his feet, it looks like, and wasn’t letting go. It must have felt like he was being attacked.
One learns about a person through his/her spontaneous acts. In this case, what one sees is what he is.
More telling even than the slap on the hand is the look on his face as he turns away— no fear or shock evident, just deep anger. If looks could kill, that woman would be with the angels.
And this is the “mercy” and “accompaniment” that Francis extends to faithful believing Catholics. Never in the history of the Catholic Church has a Shepherd treated his own flock with such utter contempt and derision.
The pope is an old man grabbed from behind and nearly yanked off his feet. In English law, what the woman did qualifies as a criminal offence called Common Assault. For sure as Christians we are called to turn the other cheek, and the Pope is right to apologise, but he has always readily admitted that he is not perfect. I doubt I would do better.
The Pope should have apologized for slapping this woman, an act of physical violence in response to what seems like an act of physical aggression by this same woman that potentially could have hurt him. He does only have one lung and is in his 80’s.
Yes, he became angry, an emotional response of which patience is the antidote at an emotional level so this is “half of the truth” he has agreed to apologize for. The “whole truth” is the Pope responded physically to her attempt to physically control him with an action of physical violence. He just need to name his actions correctly, not his emotional state that lead to the actions in order to tell the “whole truth” and to fully take responsibility for his actions and behaviors.
He could have yelled at her in anger, but he chose to slap her instead. Anger is one of the deadly spiritual sins that leads to violent behavior.
The woman was wrong to have physically grabbed him, and tried to control him, a demonic attack on the Pope. His response was physical as well as emotional. He slapped her. The demon of anger he kept and took with him as was evident on his face when he turned away from her.
Such an opposite response when Jesus was grabbed by the woman who was bleeding, and his response was healing her the moment she touched him – a total non-violent response to violence. But, the Pope is not Jesus, just a poor sinner like the rest of us.
More prayers and fasting in the Name of Jesus Christ to rid the Vatican and the Catholic Church of the demons that the Pope has invited into the Church.
Kudos to CRW for not to descending to the depths of deceit and depravity heaped upon Pope Francis by others in the far-right Roman Catholic echo chamber.
After watching the complete video a couple of times, only persons of ill-intent would criticize the Holy Father for his response. I’m only 62. Had someone yanked my arm the way that the woman yanked Pope Francis’ hand and arm (He at 82 years of age, missing a lung, and wracked with arthritis), I would have knocked her down without a moment of thought or later regret. Her actions and shouting clearly indicate someone with an agenda.
Let us also recall that in the last year, both Russia and China have assassinated people using lethal poisons delivered on doorknobs, tabletops, newspapers, and during a handshake. Every faithful Roman Catholic worthy of the name should be alarmed and outraged at the thought that this could have been a fatal encounter.
If they have not already done so, heads need to roll in the Vatican security bureaucracy, and the people of ill-will criticizing Pope Francis should worry about the beam in their own eye.