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Special
Report Parliament brought religion to the bar of world
conscience
By JOAN CHITTISTER
Cape Town, South Africa
At the final session of the World Parliament of Religions, held in
Cape Town, South Africa, from Dec. 1 to Dec. 8, Jim Kenney, Director of
International Religious Initiatives for the Council of the Parliament,
announced that the next meeting of the parliament will be held in 2004, site to
be announced, and every five years thereafter. Of all the announcements at the
conference, this one fascinated me most. The truth is that a Parliament of the
Worlds Religions could not have happened every five years before this,
for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is the lingering antagonism among
religions. I knew instinctively that this decision itself was a sign of a
changing world.
Its one thing to define a millennium by everything
weve ever read in history books. Its another thing entirely to
define it by virtue of the changes in our own lifetimes. Most of us talk about
the first, the changes they list in history books - the crusades, the rise of
national states, the invention of the steam engine, the atomic age. But most of
us do the second. Or at least just about everybody I know measures change by
shifts in their own circumstances. And I do, too.
I know that this millennium, for instance, has been a time of
massive changes because I have experienced quite a few of them myself, not the
least of all in religion.
When I was a child, talking to Protestants was rare, let alone
having them in your family as I did. When I was a child, only Catholics went to
heaven. When I was a child no woman anywhere was considered a spiritual
leader - teachers, maybe, but definitely not leaders in
anybodys church or temple or mosque or ashram. When I was a child, church
was a very personal, very private thing. And when I was a child, I was never
expected to leave the city in which I lived, and surely not the state, and
never the country. And under no conditions for the sake of religion.
But last week, at the Third Parliament of the Worlds
Religions in Cape Town, South Africa, I sat in table discussions with a Tibetan
monk, an Indian swami, a Muslim professor, a government parliamentarian, a
Jewish rabbi, an ordained Christian clergywoman and a female Sikh guru - the
first of her kind, in fact. Most of all, last week I sat in a conference that
included people from over 90 nations and every researchable religion on the
face of the earth.
More than a holy bazaar
There were more participants in the Third Parliament of the
Worlds Religions in Cape Town than religious types alone, however, and
there was more to the Parliament of Religion than some kind of interreligious,
international festival of workshops. It was more than a sampler platter of
religion. The parliament was clearly meant to be more than a holy bazaar where
the interested, the confused, the skeptical and the awestruck are welcome to
tastes of every exotic dish at hand. It was also an assembly of almost 400
religious leaders, theologians and idea agents from all the religions of the
world, whose role it is to call religion itself to the next level of public
witness and social vision.
The lasting merit of this particular parliament may well be the
fact that it carried another level of involvement for religious institutions,
as well as the other major associations of society. On hand were members of all
the major guiding institutions in society - education, government, commerce,
media, science, voluntary associations and international organizations. One of
the table participants was from Hewlett-Packard, the other from a science
department at the University of Chicago. A third was a government official in
South Africa. Most interesting of all was the fact that all of them wanted to
talk religion.
For the most part, in secular society today, religion is either
the outsider in every discussion or the well-meaning but irrelevant visitor
from an unreal planet. In this case, the mixture of secular experts and
religious professionals may well have been the first step over a living bridge
to a long-sought ideal: the infusion of meaning and values into the operational
dimensions of society rather than the usual separation and reactionism that
have become common in the eternal tension between religion and society, between
piety and life.
Leading scientists told religious leaders what they know about the
origin of life and listened while theologians from every tradition considered
what that meant to the insights each tradition had on God. Science gives
answers, Solomon Katz, anthropologist from the University of
Pennsylvania, said, not meaning. Science tells us that a thing can be
done. It does not tell us whether it is good or bad to do it.
Theologians took the position that only a global ethic - not a
global religion, not a global theology - could bring values to bear on
scientific endeavors.
Businessmen argued the need for corporate profit as a basis of
development; theologians presented the argument that only what is good for the
whole human community is really good at all.
Towards a Global Ethic, the pivotal document of the
Assembly whose primary author was Hans Küng but which had gone out to 700
religious leaders around the world for consultation and revision, took the
position that every tradition rests on four ethical principles: not to kill,
not to lie, not to steal and not to exploit anyone sexually. Or conversely, to
protect life, to deal honestly, to be just in commercial matters and to love
sincerely. The question became in what way each of the guiding institutions,
including religion itself, was actually - at this moment in history - acting in
accordance with these principles or not.
It was a moment of conspicuous convergence. Doctrines and dogmas
gave way to a common vision of the good life, not to indifferentism, not to
syncretism. Catholics left the parliament as Catholic as ever. Jews went home
Jews. Buddhists and Hindus remained totally Eastern in their spiritual outlook
and committed to their traditions. At the same time, maybe for one of the few
times in history, all of them - religious and lay alike - left centered around
the notion that without a commonly recognized global ethic we can only have
global degradation, that global problems call for global solutions.
Further, they pledged themselves in personal and corporate ways
to achieve it: to create activists of corporate shareholders, to build 10,000
tribal schools in rural India, to poll all heads of government to determine
their personal moral evaluation of nuclear weapons, to engage university
faculty and staff in interfaith work, to advocate for Indian rights to sacred
land on Mount Graham in Arizona. It was a Garden of Great Delights. But the
Garden itself, I think, is only one of the things the parliament signals for
us.
New way of being world
They also pledged themselves to come back together again five
years hence. While synods meet in Rome and the Lambeth Conference goes on
dealing with matters Anglican and the Baptist Convention announces its plans to
target key cities for concentrated evangelization efforts, the parliament
really signals, even for religion, a whole new way of being world together. The
real question is: Why now? Why did all of this happen in Cape Town and not
centuries before? And what might that be saying about the millennium?
It occurred to me that the least discussed characteristic of the
20th century might well be the development of a culture of international
conferences. There were a few of them before 1945 - this parliament itself, for
instance - but they were few and far between. They were certainly not routine.
I know of no one who attended a conference anywhere on any subject that was
truly international when I was a child growing up in a Catholic ghetto. On the
other hand, I cant remember anything but internationalism since 1945.
Everybody goes to international conferences these days. Politicians,
filmmakers, economists, doctors, bankers, and now imams, rabbis, nuns and
pastors. The question is: So what?
Do international jamborees really mean anything or are they simply
an excuse to make long trips to exotic places: Hawaii, Beijing, Cape Town? Does
anything of lasting value come out of any of them? And what are their
weaknesses?
Unlike most conferences of religious figures, The Parliament of
the Worlds Religions neither lectured the public nor concentrated on
ecclesiastical window dressing of canons or constitutions or decretals. Removed
from the details of their daily life, participants were invited to look at the
larger context in which they were operating back home, to renew their
perspectives, to learn a little, and then to engage.
Engagement came on various levels in various ways. Participants
talked face-to-face with business people and learned from scientists. The
Symposia on Science and Religion included presentations in astronomy,
chemistry, biology, anthropology, archaeology and cosmology in terms of what
they do and do not know about life, as well as a review of the universal wisdom
about the meaning and process of life that is embedded in every religious
tradition.
They prayed together, they ate together and they studied one
anothers art. They analyzed the effect of societys multiple
institutions on the quality of life. They looked at religion itself to
determine its own role and place and face in a pluralistic world. They talked
together. They connected. They called one another by name. They announced to
the world, just by coming together, that the Great Wall of Religion built brick
by fearful brick in the name of God in every childs mind was finally,
finally coming down. They indicated that it just might be possible for religion
to be religion after all.
Indeed, international meetings give visibility to globalism. They
make presence for goodwill. They bind a girdle of people around the globe. They
put faces on the others.
Two things happened at the parliament that may best embody its
symbolic value: The mayor of Cape Town, Her Holiness Nomaindia Mfeketo, came
upon parliament participants looking for food on a Sunday in a city that was
tightly closed for religious reasons. She called a restaurant owner and asked
him to open his kitchen because people needed him. And he did. In the second
incident, two groups of protesters -- one Christian, one Muslim -- who had come
to Cape Town to decry the parliament for its sins against faith and, therefore,
to decry one anothers groups as well, became acquainted with one another
in their common effort and, irony of ironies, became friends.
But international conferences do a great deal more than simply
symbolize what is possible. They raise to the level of the legitimate, by
making public, questions that plague the world and its people privately. They
turn light on issues that too long have lived in the darkness of sectarianism:
Is it really religious to deny women human rights? Is it religious
to privatize religion to the point that religion itself becomes an agency of an
oppressive state? Is it really religious to destroy what is sacred to some for
the sake of what is sacred to the other? Is it religious to educate people to
suffer exploitation for the sake of virtue, to forego justice in the name of
Gods will? Is it really religious to separate religion and life, to turn
religion into some kind of feel-good exercise while more and more of humanity
is dealt with inhumanely by institution after institution? Is it really
religious for religions to watch such things happen and say nothing, do nothing
about it? A thing like a Parliament of the Worlds Religions brings both
religion and society to the bar of the worlds conscience.
Coverage of the 1999 Parliament of the World's Religions:
http://sistersofsaintanne.org/capetown
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister of Erie, Pa., is a regular
NCR columnist.
National Catholic Reporter, December 24,
1999
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