XPost: alt.religion.christian.catholic, alt.religion.christian.roman-catholic, alt.religion.christianity
XPost: alt.christian.religion, alt.religion

Pope faces balancing act in Egypt

2017-04-27 22:19

(Alberto Pizzoli, AFP)

Vatican City - Pope Francis is facing a religious and diplomatic
balancing act as he heads to Egypt this weekend, hoping to comfort its Christian community after a spate of Islamic attacks while seeking to
improve relations with Egypt's Muslim leaders.

Security has been tightened, with shops ordered closed and police
conducting door-to-door checks in the upscale Cairo neighbourhood
where Francis will stay on Friday night. His only public Mass is being
held at a military-run stadium.

Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke said the pope wasn't overly concerned
and wouldn't use an armoured car, as his predecessors did on foreign
trips. Francis insisted on going ahead with the trip even after twin
Palm Sunday church bombings killed at least 45 people and a subsequent
attack at the famed St Catherine's monastery in Sinai.

"We're in the world of 'new normal,'" Burke said. "But we go forward
with serenity".

Dialogue and tolerance

The highlight of the two-day trip will be Francis' visit on Friday to
Al-Azhar, the revered 1 000-year-old seat of learning in Sunni Islam.
There, he will meet privately with grand imam Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb
and participate in an international peace conference.

Francis has insisted that Christian-Muslim dialogue is the only way to
overcome Islamic extremism of the kind that has targeted Christians
and driven them from their 2 000-year-old communities in Iraq, Syria
and elsewhere in the Middle East. While condemning extremist attacks
against Christians, he has said he is travelling to Egypt as a
messenger of peace at a time when the world is "torn by blind
violence".

But his message of dialogue and tolerance has been rejected as naive
by even some of his fellow Jesuits, for whom Islam remains "a religion
of the sword" that has failed to modernise. Even ordinary Egyptian
Christians see his visit as a nice gesture but one that ultimately
won't change their reality

http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/pope-faces-balancing-act-in-egypt-20170427


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com

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