The Assisi meeting, seen from Mecca
Why is it impossible to plan an Assisi-style interreligious meeting in Mecca? To answer this question it is helpful to ask three other preliminary questions:
- Why can’t you build a church in Saudi Arabia? Because that country applies Islamic law strictly.
- Why is it possible to build a mosque anywhere in the West? Because those countries are dominated by the secularist mindset resulting from the Enlightenment.
- Why is the Catholic Church the organizer of the meeting in Assisi? Because, unlike Islam, she opened herself up to the ideas of the Enlightenment at the time of the Second Vatican Council, and since then she has promoted religious freedom, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue.
And so, in order for it to be possible someday to plan an Assisi-style interreligious meeting in Mecca, there would have to be an “enlightened Islam” that had “had its own Vatican II”. There are no signs heralding this in any Muslim country, but only in the mouths of a few highly Europeanized intellectuals who are more committed to the media than to Islam.
That is why for the past 25 years the Assisi meeting has remained a unilateral invitation, without any hope of reciprocity. A one-way street leading to a dead end.
Fr. Alain Lorans
