The School of Dialogue with Oriental Religions (SOR) 2017 with its course, “Harmony among Peoples and Religions Today”, marked the conclusion of celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Focolare in Asia. Secondly, a little more than a year ago, we also observed the 50th Anniversary of the promulgation of Nostra Aetate (NA), the 2nd Vatican Council document which focuses on the relations of the Catholic Church with the faithful of different religions.
One of the most unexpected and innovative aspects of the Focolare Movement has been its commitment to interfaith dialogue, which was never planned or foreseen by its foundress and can only be explained only with an inspiration of the Spirit through events or intuitions received by Chiara lubich herself.
The Focolare, in fact, has been active on different fronts of dialogue with followers of other religious traditions, basing its experience on its vital spiritual dimension of unity that developed into different types of collaboration with others and finally reached promising academic levels.
Chiara lubich played a prophetic role in this process.
Awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1977, in the city of London, since the early 1980’s, Chiara developed a close spiritual friendship with Japanese Rev. Nikkyo Niwano, founder and President of The Risshō Kōsei-kai Movement.
After having invited her to speak to thousands of Buddhists in Tokyo, Niwano proposed a close collaboration between the two movements, especially regarding youth programs and a common involvement in Religions For Peace (formerly called World Conference for Religions and Peace).
Later, in the 1990’s came her close spiritual relationship with Theravāda monks, especially Phramaha thongratana thavorn, to whom Chiara gave the name luce Ardente, and Phra Bhavana Dhammaphirat, whom we know in the Focolare as the great Master.
Meanwhile, Chiara travelled to the Americas where, in 1997, she spoke to Afro-American Muslims in their Harlem Malcolm X Mosque and, later, to the Jewish community of Buenos Aires.
Finally, at the dawn of the new millennium, she had several close and deep contacts with hundreds of Hindus in south India and Mumbai.
The Council teaching and a new charism: Nostra Aetate (NA) and Chiara Lubich
The experience of the Focolare Movement in Asia started back in February 1966, barely a few months after Nostra Aetate was promulgated. Examining the text of Nostra Aetate we find amazing similarities between that and the charism of unity. Here we would like to offer some of these main points.
The anthropology of Nostra Aetate:
Common origin
Nostra Aetate proposes a clear anthropological dimension: each man is my brother and every woman is my sister, and as such they have to be treated accordingly.
“We cannot truly call on God, the father of all, if we refuse to treat in a brotherly way any man, created as he is in the image of God. Man’s relationship to God the father and his relationship to men his brothers are so linked together
That Scripture says: “He who does not love, does not know God” (1 John 4:8). (NA5)
Humanity a community: same origin and heading towards the same goal
One is the community of all peoples, one in their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the earth. One also is their final goal, God. His providence, His manifestations of goodness, His saving design extend to all men, until that time when the elect will be united in the Holy City, the city ablaze with the glory of God, where the nations will walk in His light”. (NA1)
From the viewpoint of Chiara’s charism, we find that this perspective was very much present since the early years of her new experience. If we look back retrospectively, she seems to have anticipated what the Council fathers would write about two decades later.
This emerges clearly from a well- known passage of a letter which she wrote to her friends in 1947. “Always fix your gaze on the one Father of many children. Then you must see all as children of the same Father. In mind and in heart we must always go beyond the limits imposed on us by human life alone, and cultivate the habit of constantly opening ourselves up to the reality of being one human family in one Father: God”.
Moreover we all know that Chiara always spoke of universal brotherhood as a reality, and at the same time, a goal to achieve. “[…] we are always surprised to see that God has led us along a spiritual pathway that intersects not only with all the other spiritual ways of Christians, but also of the faithful of other religions. In practice, we become (their) partners along the journey of brotherhood and peace. While maintaining our own identity, this pathway enables us to meet and come to a mutual understanding with all the great religious traditions of humanity”.
A characteristic of Chiara’s approach was that of never making any type of distinction at any level. “This way of loving requires us to love everyone: the pleasant and the unpleasant; the beautiful and the ugly; fellow-citizens or foreigners; those belonging to my culture or to another, those of my religion or another, friends or enemies. In fact, the Gospel asks us to be perfect, in the image of the heavenly Father who “makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust”.
The dignity of the human person: no discriminations
As a consequence of the anthropological dimension and of the common destiny of humanity, a second element which clearly emerges from Nostra Aetate is the centrality of the human person who carries within him/ herself a universal and intangible dignity. Considering the other person as a child of the same father who is God, and who comes from the same origin and moves towards the same final destination has precise consequences.
In this perspective, any attitude which involving any kind of physical, psychological or spiritual violence
Against the ‘other’ cannot be considered Christian. Discrimination on the basis of ethnic belonging, cultural background or professed belief has often led
To a religious exclusivism justifying superiority, complexes, proselytising or forced conversions, as a part of such attitudes. All of them find no place in the commitment to dialogues. Pope Benedict XVI emphatically stated, “dialogue does not aim at conversions, but at understanding.”
There can be no basis, therefore, for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned. The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion. (NA5)
These principles from Nostra Aetate have aided the focolare over the years to develop experiences of dialogue – in daily living, in concrete cooperation through projects at the social level, in youth formation programs and in commitment to peace-building and conflict resolution initiatives., Finally, they helped to achieve an exchange at the academic and theological level. All this then, together with many persons of different cultures and faiths, became a common path of dialogue.
Roberto Catalano
Roberto Catalano, is the Co-Director of the Focolare Interreligious Dialogue Center, based in Rome, Italy. This talk is an excerpt from a paper which he presented at the SOR conference 2017 last March 2-5, in Mariapolis Peace, Tagaytay City.
