Pope Francis to American interreligious symposium: world is watching
(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis received the participants in an international interreligious congress on Thursday in the Consistory Hall of the Apostolic Palace. Organized by the Instituto del Diálogo Interreligioso – the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue of Argentina, in partnership with the Organization for American States and with the collaboration of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, the symposium opened Wednesday, September 7th, at the Pontifical Augustinianum Institute to explore the theme: América en diálogo – Nuestra casa común – “America in Dialogue: our common home”.
The two-day gathering is the first of its kind for the organizations involved, and its working sessions focused on the Holy Father’s encyclical letter, Laudato si’.
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In remarks prepared for the occasion, Pope Francis said, “The world looks constantly to us, believers, to see what our attitude is towards the common house and to human rights.” The Holy Father went on to say, “The world also asks us to cooperate among ourselves and with men and women of good will who profess no religion, in order to give effective answers to the many scourges of our world,” including the scourges of war and hunger, abject poverty, ecological crises, violence, corruption and moral degradation, the crisis of the family, the economy, “and above all,” he said “the lack of hope.”
An explanatory note from the organizers addressed to Pope Francis and released to the press explains that the OAS and the Institute for Interreligious Dialogue (IDI) of Buenos Aires under the auspices of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, have brought together participants belonging and different religious traditions from various countries to discuss the creation of an Institute of Dialogue that will be continental in scope.