Fr Michael MacGreil told the Irish Catholic that with the current state of religion in the world and the advance of secularisation, religions "cannot afford the luxury of not coming together".

MacGreil said he would like to see more serious religious correspondents in the media.

"There are no real religious issues being discussed in mainstream media. There is a real danger that by not discussing religion at all, people are rejecting religion out of ignorance and are suffering from spiritual malnutrition".

He said the establishment of a General Ecumenical Council "would herald a very important step in the revival of religion, and thereby, the enhancement of the quality of life of all the people. It would also open the way for effective Christian-Jewish-Muslim dialogue, which I believe is essential for the future of world justice and peace."

"I am looking forward to the day when a Christian Council comes together, and in the long-term a council that includes Christians, Jews and Muslims coming together, for the good name of religion," he said.

Sources

• The Irish Catholic

• No press office.
• No text made available to the media, neither before, nor during, nor after.
• Only those present and those listening to Radio Notre-Dame or viewing KTO TV to were able to hear the words of the speakers in real time.
• Even the video message of Benedict XVI on the evening of March 25 was poorly publicised; his text had been available for several days, but the Vatican press office distributed it, in five languages, only the next morning.
• At the time of writing, if one enters the Vatican website and goes to the pontifical council for culture that promoted and organized the event, one finds nothing whatsoever.

At the time of writing, not even on www.parvisdesgentils.fr - the site created for the occasion - does one find a single line of what was said. There are only a skimpy program and a few notes about the speakers.

For a Courtyard created to promote the dialogue on God among all people of good will, beyond all the borders, this communicative stinginess is a clear contradiction.

The pontifical council for culture and its president, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, worked effectively in the preparatory phase of the event, to publicize it, but they vanished in the transition from announcement to realisation.

And yet, from the very first remarks, the things said in Paris were by no means commonplace.

Read more about what was said at the Courtyard of the Gentiles.

Sources

• Image: Dallas Ft. Worth Catholic

Benedict said religions had nothing to fear from secular society as long as it had "an open secularism that lets all live as they believe, in accordance with their conscience."

The Paris discussions were held at UNESCO, the Sorbonne and the Institut de France and ended with Pope Benedict, speaking via video link, to a youth rally outside Notre Dame Cathedral.

"This is a quite remarkable initiative of the Church at the highest level reaching out, in what hopefully will be a dialogue of mutual respect, to an atheism that is open to discussions of faith and reason," Catholic Communications Auckland spokesperson Lyndsay Freer said.

The decision to start the series in France, where strong secularism has pushed faith to the fringes of the public sphere, reflected Pope Benedict's goal of bringing religious questions back into the mainstream of civic debates.

According to the Vatican's Culture minister, Cardinal Ravasi, the dialogue is meant not to confront believers and atheists but to seek common ground. It is "an invitation to non-believers … to start a voyage with believers through the desert," he said.

In addressing the first gathering former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said "We must make sure that they are open to this question and to the yearning concealed within it".

Amato said a honour killing in Italy in which a Pakistani murdered his daughter for behaving as freely as Italian youth do, presents a challenge to open democracies that believers and atheists have to think about.

"Courtyard of the Gentiles," takes its name from a section of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem accessible to non-Jews, which Pope Benedict XVI has used as a metaphor for dialogue between Catholics and non-believers.

"I believe that the church should also today open a sort of 'courtyard of the gentiles' where people can in some way hook on to God, without knowing him and before having gained access to his mystery," Benedict said when launching the dialogues in February.

"We must be concerned that human beings do not set aside the question of God, but rather see it as an essential question for their lives."

Dialogues also planned for Italy, Albania, Sweden, Czech Republic, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Spain, Russia and the United States, are called "Courtyard of the Gentiles" and were announced by the Vatican in early February.

Sources

• NCR
• Reuters
• Catholic Culture