Cardinal Tomko Says Dominus Iesus Opens Dialogue

ROME, Oct. 11, 00 (CWNews.com/Fides) - A Vatican cardinal said on Tuesday that the new Dominus Iesus declaration has been misrepresented and misunderstood by those who have failed to read it.

"There has been much criticism of the Dominus Iesus declaration which has obviously not been given a proper reading or interpretation," said Cardinal Jozef Tomko, Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples, during his homily at the solemn Mass which opened the academic year at the Church's missionary college, the Pontifical Urban University. The cardinal added that the declaration "gave us the picture from which we must move."

About 600 university teachers and students took part in the celebration, including a special guest-- Archbishop Alojz Tkac of Kosice, Slovakia, which is Cardinal Tomko's home diocese. The Mass was accompanied by Vietnamese liturgical dance and Indian and Arab hymns.

In his homily, the cardinal said that the new millennium calls for a new communication of the Gospel on the part of Christians. "What is needed is bold proclamation, which neither despises nor rejects, but dialogues from the identify of our faith," he said.

Cardinal Tomko described the 20th century as a period marked by a "mystery of rejected love." He said that "on the one hand it was a century of wars, genocide, progressive secularization which distanced mankind from God," but on the other "it was the century of Christian witness to the point of martyrdom." We owe it to the martyrs, he said, if the "faith did not die even under atrocious circumstances, where the only 'religion' allowed was atheism."

CWN - Catholic World News