Priest says Catholic Church working to improve relations with Muslims

Published: 2004-12-09

UNITED NATIONS (CNS) -- The president of a Catholic university in Budapest, Hungary, told a seminar on "Confronting Islamophobia" that his institution and the Catholic Church as a whole had taken steps to improve relations with Islam, but had not found a comparable response from the Islamic side. In relation to theology, Father Gyorgy Fodor of Peter Pazmany Catholic University said Catholics acknowledged that Paradise would be open to Muslims who followed the principles of their faith, but that standard Muslim books called Christians polytheists who would go to hell. He recalled that on a visit to Damascus, Syria, Pope John Paul II apologized for crimes committed by Christians against Muslims in past centuries, but the priest said "a similar gesture from the other side" never came. Following up on an earlier seminar on anti-Semitism, a day of discussion focusing on the relatively new term Islamophobia was held Dec. 7 at U.N. headquarters in New York under the sponsorship of the world body's Department of Public Information.

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