Nostra Aetate - In Our Time

9 our Eminences, Your Excellencies, dear Secretary-General, dear friends and, I dare to say, dear brothers and sisters. The 50 years of Nostra Aetate have been a time of big change and of great opportunity. I can only say what the Declaration has done to the Catholic Church and I can try, in three short points, to summarise how this change in attitude was possible. We are all aware of a difficult point, that religions generally maintain the pretension of being true religions. I will never forget my address to Imam Sadiq University in Tehran when I posed precisely this question to the students: “How can we have dialogue between religions when each religion pretends, in one way or another, to be the true religion? On the other hand, if we all decide to renounce this pretension, that would not only be difficult, it would simply be impossible because what we believe belongs to the innermost conviction of human life.” Religious convictions are not something you change in the same way that you change your shirt from time to time. So, how can we have dialogue without renouncing truth? The situation becomes even more acute when we consider that most religions – not all, but most – have, in one way or another, a missionary appeal because we have the divine call to spread truth and justice through our belief and our life. So for us Christians, the words of the prophet Isaiah that, from Zion comes the command to law, these are holy words. Jesus said: “Go out and make all nations my disciples and teach them all that I have taught.” And the Koran is the revelation that is considered by its followers to be the definitive revelation. So, for centuries it was very rare that real dialogue was possible between believers because everybody had the conviction that they were in the possession of truth and in the possession of the true way of life. For centuries we have fought each other. Even among Christians – Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox and other religious communities – there has been conflict about the true way of living one’s own religion. When I posed this dilemma so frankly to students in Tehran, I had to give them an answer to the question: “Why are we engaged in dialogue?” I found three reasons which are closely related to Nostra Aetate and I will support them here by quotes from the Vatican II declaration about the relation of the Catholic to non-Christian religions. The first and very simple reason is that we are living in one world, and this has become so obvious that we are now speaking about the global village. In a village, people have to live door-to-door, house-to-house, close to each other in the neighbourhood. So, for these very elementary reasons, we have to live together in peace; there is no other choice. Yes, there are other choices but we are all convinced that they are false as we have seen in these dramatic events in Paris and in so many similar events in Beirut, Baghdad, Africa, Asia and so many other places in the world. This is not the way – we have to live together. But there is a fundamental reason which is common to religion, I think, all over the world. It is the conviction that humanity forms a family and that we are all created by God and, as Nostra Aetate says in the first article: “One is the community of all peoples, one their origin, for God made the whole human race to live over the face of the Earth. One is also their final goal, as God is the destiny of all of us. His providence, His manifestations of goodness, His saving design extends to all men, until that time when the elect will be united in the Holy City, the city ablaze with the glory of God, where the nations will walk in His light.” NOSTRA AETATE FOR OUR T IME Y Cardinal Schönborn greeting the Dalai Lama in traditional Tibetan manner, Pentecost 2012, Vienna