Religious Leaders Express Interest in Conference on Religious Tolerance

The patriarch of Orthodox Christianity and senior Vatican officials have expressed interest in a proposed conference devoted to increasing religious tolerance in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Central Asia.

Rabbi Arthur Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, proposed the conference to the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, when they met Jan. 2 in Istanbul.

The foundation is an ecumenical group working to advance religious freedom.

The conference would include Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and Moslem leaders, and could be organized within a year, Schneier said.

Bartholomew I was “strongly interested” in the idea and indicated he would like to host it.

Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State and Cardinal Edward Cassidy, president of its Commission for Religious Relations With the Jews, also approved of the idea, but only, at this point, in principle.

Schneier was accompanied on a visit to Ankara, Istanbul and Rome by Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Newark, N.J., a trustee of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation.

In Ankara, they met with Turkish Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel and Foreign Minister Hikmet Cetin. They did not raise the idea of the conference with the Turkish government leaders, McCarrick said at a news conference here. But he added that he “would anticipate that Turkish officials would be open to such a conference.”

The time for study of religious tolerance is ripe, said Schneier, as regional conflicts grow more violent and political structures and economies weaken.

“There are few places where ethnicity and religious are as closely linked” as Eastern Europe and Central Asia, he said, adding that as political and economic conditions worsen, religious affiliation increases.

IRAN COURTING EX-SOVIET REPUBLICS

“Some ultranationalists have tried to make the Serbian-Croatian conflict into a religious conflict,” he said.

And “there are over 16 million Moslems in the Central Asian republics” of what was formerly the Soviet Union. “They could, conceivably, become Moslem republics,” Schneier said.

“The (Persian) Gulf states and Iran are pouring a ton of money into these republics to make them Islamic,” he said. “Already, Iranian and Saudi influence is trying to snatch the souls” of the citizens of these new republics.

Iran’s foreign minister recently visited the capitals of all six Central Asian republics of the new Commonwealth of Independent States, McCarrick said.

Istanbul would be the ideal location for the conference as a city which literally bridges Europe and Asia, he said.

According to McCarrick, “there is hardly a religious denomination that has not left its footprints in that great city, the second largest city in Europe.”

As a secular state, “Turkey could show the rest of the world how to be a Muslim nation without the extraordinary thrust of fundamentalism you find in other lands,” he said.

When asked about the country’s mixed human rights record, McCarrick said that the conference would be useful “both to celebrate the good things about Turkey and to be a spur to the Turkish republic to move the rest of the way and be more tolerant of their own religious feeling.”

Turkey’s Jewish community of some 26,000 people has been alarmed at the publication of a virulently anti-Zionist, anti-Jewish, anti-American weekly newspaper called Son Mesaj, the two religious leaders reported.