ĐHY George Pell

THREE years ago I visited Lebanon for the second time, was well treated everywhere, received by President Emile Lahoud and paid courtesy visits to the leaders of the Sunnis and Shi'ites there, Mohammed Rashid Kabbani and Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.

Kabbani, the Sunni leader, spoke to me for an hour, with the help of a translator. He set out to justify the practice in the Ottoman Empire whereby Christians had to walk on the other side of the road from Muslims (for their protection, he explained). Christians then were also publicly branded with signs on their clothing, but we didn't discuss this.

As I was leaving, Kabbani asked me to do what I could to protect the rights of the Muslim minority in Australia to live peacefully. I gave him an explicit assurance on that point and asked him to work to protect the Christian community in Lebanon. He said that wasn't really necessary as they weren't a minority but Arabs like himself.

All in all it was an interesting exchange, and I am more than happy to repeat publicly here my promise to work for continuing peace in the Australian community, to work to avoid the violent confrontations which are occurring overseas between Muslims and Christians, even in Indonesia.

I am committed to dialogue and if necessary debate with our Muslim friends within the democratic constraints of Australian life. I hope I am contributing to long-term peace by what I am saying.

Let me spell out some pre-suppositions and fixed points as I see them which set the boundaries for me in the delicate, and perhaps dangerous, journey confronting Western societies.

Wherever possible, dialogue and personal contacts are desirable among religious leaders, local communities, especially religious communities, and among young people.

Accurate information, accurate understandings and a respect for truth, even across differences, are the only long-term bases for fruitful exchanges.

Dialogue among friends does not preclude public questioning and public criticism, which should be constructive, not designed to make a situation worse by threatening peace or inciting hatred, for example.

These are the fixed points: Western democracies are at war with Islamic terrorists. Security agencies, including Australia's, are working regularly to thwart terrorist attacks. These Islamic terrorists want a clash of civilisations, they want the West to overreact, to make mistakes and so bring this Armageddon closer.

I do not believe that such a clash is inevitable, but with every massive and successful terrorist attack on the West we lurch closer to such a catastrophe.

American anger if there was a succession of September 11-style events in the US does not bear contemplating. A succession of such events in Australia would produce a similar public opinion, but we would not have the military capacity to do much about it.

Knowledge of fundamental Islamic sources, for example the Koran, is useful, perhaps indispensable, as is a basic knowledge of the history of Islamic expansion. A politically correct ignorance of all this history, except for a hostile verdict on the evil Crusades, provides no basis for an adequate understanding of the crisis in which we find ourselves.

Two misleading stereotypes of religion need to be abandoned. First, that all religions are basically the same: either all good or all bad.

In fact, the great religions differ mightily one from the other in doctrine and in the societies they produce. Religions can be sources of beauty and goodness and they can be, through corruption, sources of poison and destruction. I do not exempt Christianity from this.

Second, that religions are the cause of all wars or that religion never provokes war.

The worst evils of the 20th century were provoked by anti-religious men: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Religion is more often used as a pretext for war or as a symbol of division, for example in the IRA's armed struggle in Ireland, but religion can directly contribute to and has been used to justify armed conflict and aggression.

Outside events could put great strain on the internal workings of Australian society. The time to advance peaceful dialogue across differences is now.

Australians are entitled to an answer from me on controversial Catholic or Christian teachings. And we Australians are entitled to specific answers from our friends on aspects of Islamic teaching, for example on the Suras of the Sword 9:5 and 9:36 in the Koran. It is disappointing when such requests or criticisms are met only by accusations of ignorance or abuse, while the specific points are studiously avoided.

Reciprocity is a fundamental notion in our dialogue with Islam: not in the sense of promising evil for evil, not an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but as a requirement that the civil rights we extend to all here are also to be extended to Christian minorities in all Islamic countries. This is presently not the case.

Let me move beyond my fixed points to conclude with a few remarks Pope Benedict made to his old university at Regensburg last week. Considerable attention has focused on his use of a quotation - which he described as "brusque" and did not endorse - from the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus in dialogue with an Islamic scholar fromIran.

It is possible that the dialogue took place while the Byzantine capital Constantinople was being besieged by the Turks. It eventually fell to them about 60 years later, in 1453. This quote was a small part of a dense but beautiful address on faith and reason.

The Pope quoted an old cynic who said that Regensburg University was unique because it had two faculties (a Protestant and a Catholic theology faculty) dedicated to the existence of something that did not exist. This was another quote he did not endorse.

A major thread in the address was that violence was incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. Pope Benedict had been an explicit public opponent of the second Iraq war and he also acknowledged that religions contain many different strains. One commentator claimed that the Pope's explicit appeal to reason was "a building block towards finding a way to argue with each other without using weapons".

Pope Benedict is right to stress the need for dialogue across differences, including the differences within Western civilisation. At mass, the Pope scoffed at "the idea of a mathematically ordered cosmos" without any hand of God.

He emphasised that "a reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering a dialogue of culture". This is particularly true in any dialogue with Islam, especially for our secularised Western societies.

+ ĐHY George Pell

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