A multi-faith “higher committee” was announced this week to implement the “Human Fraternity” document signed by Pope Francis and a Grand Imam in February that stated, among other things, that a “pluralism and diversity” of religions is “willed by God.”
Prominent members of the committee that has been set up in Abu Dhabi include Pope Francis’ personal secretary Monsignor Yoannis Lahzi Gaid, Bishop Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, and Judge Mohamed Mahmoud Abdel Salam, Advisor to the Grand Imam.
News of the committee’s formation was announced by Emirates News Agency, the state news agency, on Monday and confirmed by Vatican News, the Holy See’s news website, the following day.
The Committee has been tasked with “developing a framework to ensure the objectives of the global Declaration of Human Fraternity” for World Peace and Living Together are realized.” These objectives include the promotion of the “ideals of tolerance and cooperation,” according to Vatican News. It remains unclear at this point who formed the committee and gave the committee its mission.
Grand Imam of Al Azhar Al Sharif said the formation of the higher committee comes at a time when all peace lovers are required to unite and join the efforts to spread coexistence, brotherhood, and tolerance throughout the world, reported Emirates News Agency in an August 22 report.
The Grand Imam urged the committee members to spread the principles of the “Human Fraternity” document across the world so as to achieve security, coexistence, and peace for everyone, stressing that spreading the principles of the document would contribute to security and stability around the world.
The Declaration has been widely criticized for claiming that a “diversity of religions” is “willed by God,” a statement incompatible with Catholic doctrine. It says: “The pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.”
Critics say this amounts to putting the Catholic faith and its worship of the God of revelation on a same plane with religions that do not worship the true God and deliberate reject Him. It also contradicts the teaching according to which there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church.
In a direct exchange between Pope Francis and Bishop Athanasius Schneider that took place in March 2019, Pope Francis said that the phrase in question on the diversity of religions meant “the permissive will of God,” giving explicit permission to Bishop Schneider to quote his words.
Following his meeting with Pope Francis, Bishop Schneider told Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews:
“I tried to go more deeply into the question, at least by quoting the sentence as it reads in the document. The sentence says that as God wills the diversity of sexes, color, race and language, so God wills the diversity of religions. There is an evident comparison between the diversity of religions and the diversity of sexes.
...only a few weeks after Pope Francis’ private conversation with Bishop Schneider, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue sent out a letter dated February 21, 2019, to Catholic university professors in Rome, asking them to give the Declaration the “widest possible dissemination.”
The creation of a “higher committee” constitutes a further step in the promotion of a gravely problematic document, this time under the form of a joint initiative involving high-ranking members of the Catholic hierarchy and Muslim dignitaries of the prestigious Sunnite university of Al-Azhar in Cairo and others who share its (at least apparent) drive to implement a restructured, relativist type of Islam that also purports to accept a “diversity of religions” as compatible with the will of Allah.
The higher committee has been given a global role, as it will be in charge of preparing “the necessary plans to implement the document,” and will “follow up on its implementation at regional and international levels, and hold meetings with religious leaders, heads of international organizations and others to support and spread the idea behind this historic document.”
The higher committee will also be the authority in charge of supervising the new “House of Abrahamic Family” whose construction was ordered in February by the Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Saadiyat Island in order to commemorate the “historic visit by Pope Francis and Dr. Ahmad Al Tayeb, Grand Imam of Al Azhar, which culminated with the signing of the Abu Dhabi Declaration that heralds a new era in the history of humanity.”
While the Abu Dhabi document declares that religions must “never incite war, hateful attitudes, hostility and extremism, nor must they incite violence or the shedding of blood,” its writers fail to take into account that Islam was imposed through violence, bloodshed and armed conquest, and that the Koran itself, as well as the Hadiths relating the life, deeds and words of the “Prophet” are full of calls to violence towards non-Muslims.
The whole document is also permeated with the masonic vocabulary of “tolerance” and “fraternity” that rests on the idea that all forms of “dogma” or affirmation of a transcendent truth are to be rejected, while religions accept to submit to the principles of the Enlightenment that allow, at best, for the affirmation of a global “spirituality” manifesting itself through a multiplicity of beliefs and traditions.
Tashlan
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