Honorary Doctor Paolo Dall’Oglio: “Truth is not a list of dogmas”
The Italian Jesuit Paolo Dall’Oglio is committed to the dialogue between Christians and Muslims. “When encounters take place, people can believe in the future. Then our main concern is no longer how to protect our savings, but how we can give our lives sense and meaning and how we can transmit that to future generations.”
In 1992, Paolo Dall’Oglio founded an ecumenical community in the long abandoned monastery of Mar Musa el-Habashi in Damascus, Syria. The residents of the monastery work to bring about a positive relationship between Islam and Christianity.
Dall’Oglio: “I had visited the monastery for the first time ten years earlier. At that time, there were three priorities in my life. I wanted to strive for a spiritual life, rooted in both the Islamic and Christian traditions. Besides this, I considered simplicity to be the answer to the question of poverty within the Catholic Church and as the answer to consumerism, which is currently a very real global problem. The third and final priority was hospitality. In the Bible and the Koran, Abraham is considered to be the father of hospitality, which elevates hospitality to the status of a very important virtue both in the Christian and Islamic traditions. At the monastery, we also consider hospitality to be a political position.”
The location of the monastery proved to be ideal for the realisation of these three desires. “That is why I say the monastery found me rather than the other way around”, Dall’Oglio laughs. “It is a meaningful place for both Muslims and Christians, it lies on the road from the north to the south, on the border of the desert; it is a historic place of the confrontation and encounter between the Arab world and the western world.”
He mentions Abraham’s path, an initiative he helped to undertake: “You could compare it to the road to Santiago de Compostela, except that it starts in Turkey, runs through Jerusalem and ends in Hebron, where Abraham is buried. It is an explicitly interreligious and intercultural path. On their way, young people stop at various places that may help them to discover a corresponding spiritual dimension in their lives. The monastery is one of these places.”
Attractive
Paolo Dall’Oglio is very concerned about young people and their spiritual and cultural development. For this reason, he is very happy that his nomination for an honorary doctorate was an initiative of two students, Benjamin Peltier en Dries Deweer. “I was very surprised to learn that I had been nominated for an honorary doctorate”, he tells us. “But when I discovered that it was on the initiative of students, I understood far better why I had been selected.”
“We receive very many young people at the monastery. It is located in an area that speaks to one’s imagination: 1,300 metres above sea level, surrounded by mountains and rocks. It is a romantic, beautiful and inspiring place. That is why so many young people travelling though the Middle-East visit us. The young are also attracted to the fact that we are devoted to interreligious dialogue. I often hear them complaining about how impossible they find it to believe in a religion, precisely because the various religions are at loggerheads with one another. That is why young people are attracted to our monastery, where actual inter-religious encounters do take place and where, every day, we try to build an intercultural Arab-Christian community. The way we live is meaningful to young people, who are often very concerned with the way in which their societies deal with the arrival and integration of different cultures.”
One glance at current events is enough to make clear that interreligious dialogue is an enormous challenge today. Greater perhaps that it has ever been. Paolo Dall’Oglio agrees: “After the colonial period, primarily nationalistic and socialist-communist projects became prominent. They became so important in some countries that religion was moved to the sidelines. But then the socialist dream disintegrated and we increasingly found ourselves in a universalistic system. In this context, Islam presents itself as an all-encompassing solution for the future of humankind. But Hinduism is also omnipresent and Christians have not abandoned their universal dream either. This confronts us with a clash of universalisms. That is precisely why interreligious dialogue and interaction are of such crucial importance.”
This is also the reason why it is important to know one’s own traditions. “After all, if they lose their meaning, history will become as dry as dust”, Dall’Oglio continues. “A young person walking through the beauties of Leuven without any knowledge of the middle ages becomes a stranger in his or her own world. The same is true of young Muslims. Estrangement from one’s traditions is becoming a problem. It creates a space for fundamentalist identity formation. Today, young people are being confronted in the most pressing way with this fundamental problem of cultural development.”
Hak
The three key-words that typify Paolo Dall’Oglio are faith, truth and justice. “I’m very pleased that everyone writes that about me”, he laughs. “I feel honoured by it.” The words faith and faithfulness are very closely related and that is also the way he considers them in reality. “My faith and my faithfulness to it encompass everything that is valuable in my tradition and that compels me to discover the things that are genuine, valuable, important and beautiful in other traditions. This enables one to reconcile faithfulness to one’s own faith on the one hand and having faith in interreligious dialogue on the other.”
In turn, justice is the necessary condition for this dialogue. “Without justice, the dialogue is meaningless. Moreover, justice is a central concept in every worldview, whether one is a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, an atheist, etc. But justice cannot succeed without forgiveness and reconciliation is impossible without justice. This much at least must be very clear.”
Truth, finally, is a word that refers to something very profound and essential, but which can move in various directions. “The Arabic word for truth is ‘hak’,” Dall’Oglio tells us. “But ‘hak’ also means God and justice. It can be used to refer to fundamentalism, jihad, confrontation and conflict, but it should become the word we use to express our passion. After all, the future depends on the choices we make, the people we meet and the decisions we take in our lives. The truth is not a list of dogmas. It is something that happens. The truth speaks to us, attracts us and offers itself to us. If we are receptive, curious and eager to connect with one another, the truth will feel at home with us and amongst us.”
Dall’Oglio not only hopes that his honorary doctorate will strengthen the relationship between his monastery and the K.U.Leuven, but also that it will create opportunities for cooperation with Syrian universities. “I would be very happy to help to establish such cooperation. Students and professors from Leuven are most welcome to come and visit us, he concludes.”
