The Vatican has disconcerted Italian politicians — and some of the Roman Catholic Church’s most senior prelates — by endorsing a proposal by radical Muslims for a weekly ”Islamic hour” in schools with a strong Muslim presence.
”If in a school there are 100 Muslim children, I don’t see why their religion shouldn’t be taught,” said Cardinal Renato Martino, a minister in the Vatican’s government, the Roman Curia.
The Speaker of the Italian Senate, Marcello Pera, who has launched a movement for the defence of Europe’s Christian values, said the suggestion was ”the diametric opposite of any kind of attempt at integration”. In a note posted on the internet, he said it ”tended, on the contrary, to reinforce the idea of an autonomous Muslim community inside the Italian state”.
Several commentators reacted by calling for an equal degree of freedom for Christians in Muslim countries. The Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, a candidate for the papacy last year, said religious freedom is ”the greatest of all liberties”.
The call for an Islamic hour was among the first products of a new Islamic Council, a consultative body set up last year to improve relations with Italy’s Muslim inhabitants who now account for almost 2% of the population.
Martino’s idea won backing from two parties with a strong Catholic component: the National Alliance, which grew out of Italy’s main neo-fascist party, and the Democracy and Freedom party. The Vatican is known to be deeply concerned about the spread of tensions between Christians and Muslims, especially since the riots that followed the recent publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
What worried many observers was the way in which Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, appeared to be offering support to radical Muslims while undermining moderates.
There have been growing calls in recent years for the authorities to provide backing to Muslim representatives ready to speak out against terrorism and fundamentalism. Pera said a meeting of the Islamic Council this week resulted in a resounding defeat for the extremists. A document was adopted that condemns terrorism and faith hate and endorses gender equality.
The Islamic hour, by contrast, was one in a string of demands tabled by a group close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Other proposals included the censorship of school text books.
A spokesperson for the group that in Italy represents the World Muslim League said it would have been better if the cardinal had proposed an hour in which children studied the history of all religions.
The influential Islamic affairs commentator of the newspaper Corriere della Sera, Magdi Allam, wrote: ”Before thinking about the Qur’an in schools, we ought to be taking care to reaffirm Italy’s national identity, meaning language, culture and shared values.” — Guardian Unlimited Â