Europe, Global, Global Geopolitics, Headlines, Human Rights, Religion

RELIGION: Beyond Tolerance, Togetherness

Sabina Zaccaro

ROME, Mar 19 2008 (IPS) - She was the white Christian woman who rose to preach in a mosque – the Malcolm Shabazz mosque in Harlem, New York – addressing close to 3,000 mostly Afro-American Muslims. Ten years later, about 40,000 people of all faiths, and many religious leaders from around the world, gathered in Rome to say ‘thanks’ to Chiara Lubich, who dedicated her life to the ideal of unity between nations, religions and races.

Lubich died Friday, aged 88. “Chiara was a mother to us, we have been overwhelmed by her unique spirituality,” said a Buddhist monk from Thailand at Lubich’s funeral Tuesday. “She didn’t belong to Christians only, but to the entire humanity.”

Chiara Lubich, who was honorary president of the World Conference of Religion for Peace, was spiritual leader and founder of the Focolare movement, an international network of small Catholic communities committed to unity through dialogue within Christianity, among religions, and with people of no formal faith.

Lubich was a 24-year-old primary school teacher when she launched her movement along with a group of young women in 1944 in Trento, northern Italy, the city where she was born.

Under her leadership, Focolare – which means ‘hearth’ – spread to more than 180 countries. It has more than two million members that include Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox believers, as well as members of other faiths. By special permission from the Vatican, the seat of the Roman Catholic faith, Focolare became the first Catholic organisation to admit members of other Christian churches and other faiths to its communities.

She addressed 10,000 Buddhists at their temple in Tokyo in 1997. The same year, she addressed nuns and monks in Thailand before moving on to preach at the Harlem mosque. In 2000, she addressed a meeting in Washington where about 5,000 Christians and Muslims participated.

Izak-el M. Pasha, Imam of the Harlem Malcolm Shabazz mosque, attended Chiara Lubich’s funeral as a representative of Warith Deen Mohammed, leader of the Muslim American Society, a community of about two million.

“In these last ten years, Imam Warith Deen Mohammed has been working on fostering positive interfaith dialogue through nationwide lecturing and involvement in the Focolare movement,” Imam Pasha told IPS. “Thanks to these two persons our communities have become one family.”

Imam Pasha says his community experiences dialogue with Catholics concretely. “When we talk about dialogue, people think of something distant; but dialogue means concrete support, means caring and looking after each other, always trying to be there to deal with real issues, being together as a family would, with real everyday issues.”

Focolare began as a “new Catholic movement”, inspired by Catholic values while introducing innovations such as ecumenism and interfaith understanding, and a reassessment of the importance of the laity. These innovations made the road to official recognition by the Vatican (obtained in 1962 and confirmed in 2007) long and sometimes hard.

The movement launched dialogue with groups from many world religions – Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox Christians, and from outside Christianity the Buddhist lay movement Rissho Kosei-kai which has six million adherents, the Muslim American Society with more than two million, and the Swadhyaya Family from India with eight million, mostly Hindu. Dialogue is under way also with Jews, Taoists, Sikhs and animists.

“The long work of Chiara Lubich is today a concrete reality,” says Kamel Layachi, an Algerian who is Imam of the Islamic Council of Venice in north-east Italy. “In many parts of the world, including Italy, it has led to a fertile dialogue among different religions and religious leaders.”

In countries where dialogue is historically challenged by violent ethnic or religious clashes, the movement communities “work for unity with facts, rather than preaching,” Paul Lemarie from the International Focolare Movement based in Rocca di Papa near Rome told IPS.

Lemarie has spent many years in the Focolare community of Tlemcen in Western Algeria. “In the gloomy years of terrorism in Algeria, some of our Muslim friends were surprised to see that in a country where people killed other people in the name of God, someone was ready to lose his life to help others and love others, in the name of God. During the period of violence and massacres, we chose to remain there, with our brothers in Algeria.”

The Muslim world, he said, “is particularly sensitive to the intention by which it is approached. The key for communion is that in our communities we don’t preach, we simply act without prejudices.”

Lemarie recalls that Chiara wanted the final aim of the Focolare movement to be “the lived experience of fraternity.” This is what made it possible for a white, Christian woman to be “naturally received” by Muslim communities in mosques, “since Muslims look at facts, at actions, more than words, and what raised their interest were the facts produced by Chiara’s words.”

The movement has set up a school for interfaith dialogue at Tagaytay near Manila in the Philippines. Another school for dialogue is based in Luminosa in the U.S.