Pope slams ‘childlike’ whims of powerful who start wars

SAKHIR, Bahrain (AP):

With Russia’s war in Ukraine raging, Pope Francis joined Muslim, Christian and Jewish leaders on Friday in calling for the great religions to work together for peace, telling an interfaith summit that religion must never be used to justify violence and that faith leaders must oppose the “childlike” whims of the powerful to make war.

On his second day in the Gulf Arab kingdom of Bahrain, Francis closed out a conference on East-West dialogue sponsored by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa and then met separately with Muslim leaders at the royal mosque.

It was his second such conference in as many months, following one in Kazakhstan, evidence of Francis’ core belief that moments of encounter among people of different faiths can help heal today’s conflicts and promote a more just and sustainable world.

Sitting around him in the Sakhir royal palace grounds were leading Muslim imams, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians and US rabbis who have long engaged in interfaith dialogue. Speaker after speaker called for an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine and the start of peace negotiations. The Russian Orthodox Church, which sent an envoy to the conference, has strongly supported the Kremlin in its war and justified it on religious grounds.

Francis told the gathering that, while the world seems to be heading apart like two opposing seas, the mere presence of religious leaders together was evidence that they “intend to set sail on the same waters, choosing the route of encounter rather than that of confrontation”.

“It is a striking paradox that, while the majority of the world’s population is united in facing the same difficulties, suffering from grave food, ecological and pandemic crises, as well as an increasingly scandalous global injustice, a few potentates are caught up in a resolute struggle for partisan interests,” he said.

“We appear to be witnessing a dramatic and childlike scenario; in the garden of humanity, instead of cultivating our surroundings, we are playing instead with fire, missiles and bombs, weapons that bring sorrow and death, covering our common home with ashes and hatred,” he said.

King Hamad, for his part, urged a coherent effort to stop Russia’s war in Ukraine and promote peace negotiations, “for the good of all of humanity”.

The visit is Francis’ second to a Gulf Arab country, following his 2019 landmark trip to Abu Dhabi, where he signed a document promoting Catholic-Muslim fraternity with a leading Sunni cleric, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, who is the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the seat of Sunni learning in Cairo, and has become Francis’ key partner in promoting greater Christian-Muslim understanding to promote peace and fight climate change.

Al-Tayeb joined Francis in Bahrain and was on hand last month in Kazakhstan, too. In his prepared remarks, he called Friday for an end to Russia’s war “to spare the lives of innocents who have no hand in this violent tragedy”.

Al-Tayeb also called for Sunni and Shiite Muslims to engage in a similar process of dialogue to try to heal their centuries of division, and added that Al-Azhar was prepared to host such an encounter. The Sunni-Shiite split within Islam is rooted in the question of who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad after his death in 632.