The 2004 Parliament of the World’s Religions

Fr. Thomas Ryan, CSP, directs the Paulist North American Office for Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations in New York City. He is an advisor to Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and wrote the following report on the Parliament of the World’s Religions, where he was one of the thousands of persons in attendance..

It came during the discussion period of a session entitled “Finding the Brother in the Other: Overcoming Negative Images of Other Faiths as We Build Our Religious Identities and Seek Common Ground.” A Muslim imam from Rwanda took the mike and expressed how valuable he was finding this “free zone” where people from different religions could meet to talk together. “I am from Rwanda,” he said, “where one million people were slaughtered in a hundred days because people did not find a brother or sister in the other.” Then he turned to Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, an Orthodox Jewish member of the presenting panel, and said, “I am getting to know Jews here. I really appreciate what you have been saying about Judaism not being just a way to be Jewish, but a way to be human—and so it must be with all other religions, too. I want to shake your hand!” And as he went toward the panelists’ table, the Rabbi got up and came around the table to meet him and the two spontaneously embraced. Suddenly everyone in the room was gripped with the poignancy of the moment, and then all present erupted in applause as the imam and the rabbi stood before us in a prolonged embrace. It was a minute that effectively caught the raison d’etre of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

The first Parliament, held in Chicago in 1893, is widely regarded as the beginning of the interreligious movement worldwide. A hundred years transpired before the next one, held again in Chicago in 1993. It was generally recognized that the new situation of religious pluralism in most countries of the world demanded more frequent designations of a “free zone” in which people from all religions could come together to talk, pray, share meals, sing and dance. The third Parliament took place just six years later in Capetown, South Africa.

This summer’s Parliament from July 7-14 in Barcelona, Spain, was the fourth. There were 6500 participants from a total of 75 countries. The setting was the five-month-long Universal Forum of Cultures, a new kind of event where participants from all over the world can seek solutions to the most urgent problems of our time. The Forum’s three core themes revolved around cultural diversity, sustainable development, and conditions for peace. The Parliament of the World’s Religions, a centerpiece among the Forum’s events, represented a large-scale dialogue between people working in interreligious movements in harmony with the Forum’s goals.

The theme of the Barcelona Parliament was “Pathways to Peace: the Wisdom of Listening, the Power of Commitment.” The Parliament is more a gathering of people engaged in interreligious relations at local and regional levels than an Assembly of high-level leaders. It offers an opportunity to foster mutual understanding and respect; to recognize the humanity of the other and broaden our sense of community; to learn to live together in harmony in the midst of diversity; to seek justice, peace, and sustainability of the earth’s resources; and to deepen one’s own spirituality. In short, to actively work for a better world.

The Assembly of Leaders
Although the Parliament is more a movement of people than a decision-making assembly of high-level leaders, there is a place in the Parliament process for religious leaders to gather and talk. It is called the Parliament Assembly. In 1993 in Chicago, 250 leaders of religious and spiritual traditions and international religious organizations met to discuss a document which has come to be called Towards A Global Ethic. Based on the work of Prof. Hans Küng, it presents four ethical principles common across the major eastern and western traditions. Since 1993, the Global Ethic has been translated into many languages, has provided a focus for many books, and has engendered much additional study.

At Capetown in 1999, the participation in the Assembly of Leaders was broadened to include young people as well as leaders from eight guiding institutions: Religion and Spirituality; Government; Agriculture, Labor, Industry, and Commerce; Education; the Arts and Communications Media; Science and Medicine; International Governmental Organizations; and Organizations of Civil Society. These leaders considered another document, A Call to Our Guiding Institutions, which presented an invitation to people leading these institutions to consider how they would behave if they took seriously the principles from the Global Ethic.

The 2004 Assembly met for three days prior to the Parliament at the famous Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, nestled among towering mountain peaks, about an hour and a half outside of Barcelona. The decision by the Chicago-based Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religions was not to pursue another formal document at this gathering, but to call for religious and spiritual communities to develop and enact practical and transformative responses to four critical issues: improving the plight of refugees, relieving the crushing burden of international debt on poor countries, creating access to clean water, and overcoming religiously motivated violence. The methodology used in the Assembly meetings involved identifying “simple and profound acts” that make a contribution to a just, peaceful, and sustainable world. Participants were asked to view the issues through the lens of their own traditions. What in one’s own tradition compels and inspires one to care about this issue? How does the strategy for social change embedded in the teachings of one’s own and others’ traditions shape one’s response? Through pilot projects and grassroots organizing, through partnerships and collaborations, the Council for the Parliament seeks to encourage religious and spiritual communities to make an effective and constructive contribution.

Simple, Profound Acts
If simple and profound acts were the focus, the center and heartbeat of the Parliament for many of its participants were two large, off-site tents called The Parliament by the Sea, just a five-minute walk along the Mediterranean sea from the Universal Forum of Cultures’ buildings in which Parliament venues took place. Over the entry to one of the tents was the word “Gurudwara,” and over the entry to the other, “Sacred Space.” Both were erected by the international Sikh community, which was observing and celebrating four historic anniversaries. In the huge Gurudwara, the Sikh temple and gathering place, Sikh men and women prepared and served blessed vegetarian food for lunch and supper every day of the Parliament at no charge for all who wished to come. Nishkar Seva (selfless service) is a fundamental tenet of the Sikh faith: performing voluntary selfless service in helping the needy without expecting any reward.

Every day for seven days, five to six thousand Parliament participants were greeted warmly at the entry to the tent by members of the Sikh community and invited to wash their hands, remove their shoes and receive a white, kerchief-like head covering (a mark of respect towards God the Giver) before going in and sitting down on the floor in long rows facing one another. Sikh men came down the center of the rows one after another to ladle simple and nourishing food from large containers onto plastic plates (all washed by hand and reused) and to distribute bottles of water. There was something about being barefoot and on the floor that created a sense of openness and dialogue. People just randomly looked and smiled at one another. Many remarked about “the wonderful energy” in the tent and how their best conversations with other participants took place within it.

In the Gurudwara there was a temple area where a continuous reading took place of the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh volume of scripture exalted to the status of a living prophet. Next to the place of worship, participants could learn more through an extensive exposition about the spirituality and practice of those who had so generously and cheerfully abated their physical hunger and thirst. Next to the temple area was a labyrinth which participants could walk in quiet meditation. The perimeter of the second tent, Sacred Space, was framed by the symbol of each religion depicted on the floor with colored earth, sand, and pebbles. More like a great open-air canopy, it faced the sea and provided room for personal and group contemplation, chanting, and prayer.

Religion and What It Means To Be Human
In the Parliament’s opening plenary session, Raimon Panikkar, a native of Catalonia, Spain, extended a “welcome to all respectable immigrants to this planet. We have all arrived,” he said, “without our papers. We’re here to transform and renew what the very concept of religion is. We are now in the fifth millennium of religious history. People are unable to stop being religious. But religion which cannot enable us to live harmoniously with one another is no religion.”

This theme—of religion representing a way to become more fully human—surfaced and resurfaced throughout the Assembly sessions attended by this participant. On the first day of the Symposium on Interfaith Education, planned and organized by a network of organizations in the United States, panelist Fr. Leo Lefebure from Fordham University in New York City and a MID advisor said, “The agenda is to determine what, amidst all the diversity of religions and practice, truly contributes to human flourishing, and what is oppressive.”

In a session on “Developing Rationales Within the Christian Tradition for Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation,” the Rev. John Titaney, rector and professor of Wacona Christian University in Indonesia, sounded a similar note: “Religion consists of two aspects: a vision of what it means to be authentically and fully human, and ways in which a community strives to realize that vision.”

In another panel presentation, entitled “The Battle for God,” Dr. Kamar Kammaruzzaman, a professor at the Islamic International University in Australia, observed that “It’s fundamentally important that we know what being a human is all about. Once we get that, we can then understand one another. From a Muslim perspective, the human person is a physical, intellectual, and spiritual being. So we need to pay attention to economic standards of living (the physical), the level of education (intellectual), and prayer and service (spiritual).” It was another way of underlining why the Parliament at this meeting was calling adherents of all religions to focus on some fundamental human needs of our time represented in its four critical issues of refugees, international debt, clean water, and religiously motivated violence.

Learning the Other’s Language
Among the Parliament’s programmatic offerings were fifteen symposia, each of which focused on a particular subject and gave it coherent development through several sessions. The three-day Interfaith Education Symposium was organized by ten American organizations that simply decided to create a program that responded to the needs of our time. One of its keynote speakers, Madhu Kishwar, a senior fellow for the Center for Developing Societies in New Delhi, said, “There is no substitute for learning about each other’s faith and culture in daily interaction. The best seminars and books can’t substitute for that.” Dr. Paul Knitter of Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, stressed that religious educators have to show one can be at one and the same time fully committed to one’s own religious tradition (and critical of it), and genuinely open to others’ traditions.

Dr. Panikkar brought the message that “to understand each other, we must know the ‘language’ of the other. We have not only to use our reason, but our heart. If our speech doesn’t touch hearts, it’s just blah-blah. The great sages of Greece in the centuries before Christ didn’t write very much. They chiseled hearts with their words. The wisdom of human listening is to understand the human ‘voice’—not as disembodied in a radio broadcast or audio tape, but as a more comprehensive communication that expresses the person I see before me, for whom the words spoken are only ten percent of what is conveyed.”

Buddhist scholar Rita Gross challenged those who work in programs of Christian pastoral formation and leadership to provide for their students authentic experiences of other religious traditions; that is, to learn from a scholar/practitioner and not just from a book. “Learn to use their language,” she invited, “rather than taking it and immediately translating it into terms with which you are more familiar and comfortable.”

In paying tribute to what he had learned from the Dalai Lama (whose health did not permit him to be present), Fr. Lefebure cited several gifts he had received from him: his irrepressible laughter and radiant smile, all the more powerful because they witness that the cruelties inflicted upon his people have not crushed his spirit; his non-violent response to violence in extremely difficult circumstances over decades; his appreciation of the gifts of other traditions and respect for their differences, coupled with deep rootedness in his own tradition; and his openness to learning from other religions and applying those insights to his own, all the while avoiding a blending that would be like, in his words, “trying to put a yak’s head on a sheep’s body.”

Sr. Deirdre Mullan, RSM, in a session titled “Beyond Hate: Living With Our Deepest Differences in Northern Ireland,” witnessed through a personal story to the constant work required to remove our own subtle prejudices and blind spots as we try to build bridges of understanding. She told how she had wanted to create a learning environment of respect for others in her Catholic primary school classroom in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Towards that end, she went out and bought little flags from 400 countries to put up in the classroom. When they were put up and counted, there was only 399. In checking to see which country was missing, she realized that she had subconsciously skipped over buying and putting up Great Britain’s flag. So she went back to the store for one more purchase.

A Religious Olympics
The Interfaith Education Symposium and the other symposia programs were just part of a dizzying array of Parliament offerings. Each day there were 80 different programs offered: from 8-9 a.m., Morning Prayer Observances (20); from 9:30-11 a.m., Intrareligious Sessions (20); from 11:30-1 p.m., Interreligious Sessions (20); and from 3-4:30, Engagement Seminars (20). In other words, each day a participant in the Parliament faced 80 different sessions and could chose one from each of the program sections for a total of four. In addition, during the 1-3 p.m. lunch break, there were films, performances of music, dance, drama, and poetry from the different religious traditions, and in the evenings, from 7-9 p.m., a Plenary Session. And all around the Parliament sessions, on the grounds of the five-month-long Barcelona International Forum, there were expositions from the domains of science, history, culture and architecture, as well as a variety of shows being offered for entertainment.

The overall effect was something akin to what one might imagine a Religious Olympics to be like—not in the sense of competition, but in the sense of diversity of participants, multiplicity of venues taking place simultaneously, richness of experience and encounter, all lived in a spirit of both serious purpose and international celebration. Participants will long remember the evening of Sacred Music from the different religions performed under the stars in front of the illuminated facade of Barcelona’s fantastic and most readily identifiable monument, the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) Church, designed by the brilliant modernist architect Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926).

To be sure, there is a certain self-selective character to gatherings like this. They tend to draw those who already believe we should be in dialogue with one another and can learn from each other. But every movement of change in the world needs a committed core of activists if it is to succeed. Ibrahim Ramey, coordinator of the Peace and Disarmament program of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, perhaps said it best: “The fundamental task is to develop the capacity to love. This is what makes us invincible.”

There is a rabbinical story in which a rabbi asks his pupils, “How do you know when night has ended and the day begins?” A student replied, “When you can look out into the field and distinguish a cow from a horse.” No, said, the rabbi. Another student offered, “When you can determine the difference between a white thread and a black thread.” Again the rabbi wagged his head from side to side. “You know,” he said, “when you can look into the face of your neighbor and see there a brother or sister. Until you can do that, whatever time of the day it is, it is still night.”

The 2004 Parliament of the World’s Religions represented a strong step forward through the night towards the dawn.

Bulletin 73 • Index