✣ Pope Francis meets influential Sunni leader
What happened? Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, arguably the most senior cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, met Pope Francis during a private audience at the Vatican. Al-Tayeb is grand imam of Al-Azhar, the Sunni centre of learning in Cairo. The two men spoke for 25 minutes, focusing on the possibilities for religious communities to give a common witness against extremism. Al-Tayeb had previously broken off talks with Benedict XVI. Francis told Al-Tayeb: “The meeting is the message.” What the British media are saying The Daily Mail called the meeting “a historic bid to reopen dialogue”, and said that the two leaders had spoken about the plight of persecuted Christians. The paper also reported that after the meeting, al-Tayeb will go to Paris “to open a Muslim-Catholic conference on East-West relations”. Lebanon’s Daily Star noted that relations between the Church and Sunni Islam had strengthened in the past few years. For instance, Pope Francis had “underlined” his commitment to dialogue with Muslims “with a personal message to the Muslim world to mark the end of the first month of Ramadan of his pontificate”. After Benedict XVI’s call for better protection of Egypt’s Christian minority, Al-Azhar froze talks. So the visit “marks the restoration of cordial relations between the two faiths”. What the vaticanisti are saying The meeting was a major event, said Gerald O’Connell at America magazine. “Some 22 per cent of the world’s population is Muslim today, and 85 per cent of all Muslims are Sunnis”; Al-Azhar “is the most prestigious centre of learning of Sunni Islam” and forms more imams than anywhere else. John Allen of cruxnow.com observed that Pope Francis already had “considerable political capital in the bank in the Muslim world”. As an Argentine, he is not associated with Western foreign policy – which he has sometimes openly criticised. He has visited several countries with majority Muslim populations, and housed Muslim refugees at the Vatican. The meeting was “a chance to spend [some of that] capital”, by raising religious freedom and the battle against extremism.
