Hawzah News Agency (Qom, Iran) – The 10th round of interfaith dialogue between Iran and Vatican was held last month by the efforts of Iran's International Organization for Interfaith Dialogue during which many religious scholars as well as university academics attended.
Hawzah News interviewed some of the members of the Iranian delegation to get some insights into the discussed interfaith topics in the Vatican which took place last month;
Hujjat al-Islam Mortadha Javadi Amoli, a senior Shia cleric, was among the participants of the interfaith dialogues; he spoke on the importance of holding such events between Islam and Christianity saying, "The monotheistic religions are all considered as one single faith in their very essence despite their apparent differences, since Allah's guidelines for mankind which has been revealed to us through prophets cannot be in the form of more than one single religion."
He noted that Pope Francis appreciated Iran's current global stature and reiterated that Iran's way of negotiation with the world powers has captured international attention towards conducting further peaceful talks in important issues; Iran's diplomacy has also neutralized the foreign threats imposed on the country, Pope advocates constructive negotiations among countries and he believes that nations must work towards reaching a fair and lasting global peace.
Ayatollah Abolghasem Alidoust, an Iranian cleric, is another member of Iran's delegation to the Vatican; he said, "During the meetings, both sides mainly discussed issues beyond the scope of Islam and Christianity as we tried to focus on our shared values and commonalities."
He went on, "Since such interfaith dialogues are mainly concerned with humanities other than Islamic or Christian doctrine, it's common that there won't be much disagreement during the course of dialogues and the discussions proceed rather smoothly."
Hujjat al-Islam Abdolhusayn Khosropanah, a senior Shia cleric, also made some remarks regarding the dialogues saying, "During the course of talks between Iranian and Christian scholars we came to notice that there are so many common values and ideas shared between both sides as we jointly condemned the terrorism and extremism in the world and agreed that rational human approaches and negotiations must replace violence."
"Both delegations further decried radical and extremist groups which are undermining Islam and Christianity and asserted that more efforts must be done to strengthen peace in Islam as well as Christianity." he concluded.
End.