c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) “I believe that today God invites us to change our old practices,'' said Pope John Paul II, speaking to some 80,000 Muslim youth in a stadium in Morocco in 1985. “We must respect each other, and we must also stimulate each other in good works on the path of God.'' Christians and Muslims have “badly understood each other, opposed and exhausted each other in polemics and wars. Dialogue between Christians and Muslims is today more necessary than ever.''

This message is even more urgent today than 20 years ago. How John Paul's successor brings a global Catholic church into productive, peacebuilding dialogue with global Islam will be critical.

From the beginning of his papacy, John Paul II put into practice a new approach to other religions. His speeches, statements, and dialogues with people of many faiths constitute a legacy unprecedented in the papacy. Indeed, no religious leader, except perhaps the Dalai Lama, has made interfaith relations such a clear priority.

For John Paul II, seeking what is true required the dialogue of real encounter. As he explained at a Mass in India in 1991, “Dialogue is a means of seeking after truth and of sharing it with others. … As we open ourselves in dialogue to one another, we also open ourselves to God.''

This deep encounter was evident just eight months after his election as pope, when he returned to Poland and paid a visit to Auschwitz, the first visit ever to the concentration camp by a Roman Catholic pope. In April 1986, John Paul II made the first-ever visit of a pope to a Jewish community in Rome.

“You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers,'' he said.

And there was the first papal repentance for the Holocaust in 2000. Who can forget the images of the pope on his knees on the floor of St. Peter's Basilica, beginning the Lenten season with prayers of repentance for those in the church whose disobedience “contradicts the faith we profess.'' He prayed that “in recalling the sufferings endured by the people of Israel throughout history, Christians will acknowledge the sins committed by not a few of their number against the people of the Covenant.''

Later that spring, we saw the images of an enfeebled pope at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, rising from his chair to approach the Holocaust survivors who had come to meet him. He deliberately moved toward them, rather than letting them come to him.

His encounter with Muslims continued, too. He spoke to religious and political leaders in Tunisia in 1996 and received President Khatami of Iran in 1999. He made the first-ever papal visit to Egypt. Again, the images were conveyed worldwide: the pope greeted by a long line of Muslim clerics on his way to a private meeting with Sheik Tantawi at Al-Azhar. Traveling on to St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai, John Paul II observed the dry wind coming down from the mountain and commented, “That wind carries the insistent invitation to dialogue between the followers of the great monotheistic religions.''

For all his dialogical good will, however, the pope's legacy is not without its complexities. His attempt to represent Islam and Buddhism in his 1994 book “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,'' was misguided and generated hostility. His caricature of the Quran as a scripture that “completely reduces Divine Revelation'' was hurtful to the Muslims he hoped to understand in dialogue. His portrayal of Buddhism as “negative'' and “world-denying,'' failed to capture the compassion for all living beings that so suffuses Buddhist practice. When he visited Sri Lanka in January 1995, Buddhist leaders boycotted his speech in protest.

The same pope who built new bridges with the Jewish people and recognized the state of Israel also moved the beatification of Pius IX, widely perceived to be anti-Semitic. And he issued “Dominus Jesus'' in 2000, a document that expresses deep resistance to a “theology of religious pluralism.'' The interfaith legacy is complex, but so was the pope.

John Paul II was convinced that dialogue is not about seeking consensus or negotiating faith convictions. It is about encounter and relationship. In this, his warmth and energy made him brilliantly skillful, even with those who disagreed with him. Without compromising his faith, he opened his heart.

Speaking in Los Angeles in 1987, he challenged people of every faith to draw upon their “deepest and most vivifying sources, where conscience is formed.'' Together, he said, we must join in “the great battle for peace.''

The battle for peace will depend on vigorous bridge-building with Muslims and people of all faiths and creating an interfaith infrastructure that will bear the heavy traffic of a global civilization. This must be high on the agenda of the next pope.

MO/JL END RNS

(Diana L. Eck is a professor of comparative religion and the director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University)