In Asia, a continent where great cultural and religious traditions had their origin, dialogue becomes particularly significant for Christians for they can see the “seeds of truth” the Holy Spirit placed in other faiths and can make them blossom towards Christianity.The Asian theological perspective of the Note of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on some aspects of evangelisation was examined by Card Ivan Dias, prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, who took part in the presentation of the document.
Asia, he said, “is the biggest continent in the world and is home to two thirds of the human population; it is the cradle of many civilisations, religious traditions and cultures” from Hinduism to Buddhism, from Judaism to Islam, just to mention a few.
“Christianity’s origins are also in Asia” and when in November 1999 John Paul II visited New Delhi he “prophetically asserted that the third millennium would be that Asia’s evangelisation.”
Faced with such a broad range of religious traditions, Christians must “try to discover therein the action of the Holy Spirit—in other words the 'seeds of truth' as the Second Vatican Council chose to call them—and lead them, with no pretensions to superiority, to the full knowledge of the truth in Jesus Christ.” Why? “Because “even though these various non-Christian religions possess the Semina Verbi, the seeds of the Word, which the Holy Spirit planted in them so that the people who adhere to them can be saved, that does not mean that the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ is something irrelevant. [On the contrary,] “it is our duty to encourage the seeds of the Word to ripen so that they can find their fullness in Christ.”
From this point of view “other religions represent a positive challenge for the Church; they stimulate her both to discover and recognise the signs of Christ's presence in the action of the Spirit, and to develop her own identity and bear witness to the integrity of Revelation, of which she is the depositary for the good of everyone.”
From this follows the spirit which must encourage dialogue in the context of mission. “The interlocutor must be consistent with his traditions and religious convictions as well as open to understand those of others without pretence or defensiveness, but with truth, humility, loyalty; knowing that dialogue can enrich everyone. There can be no abdication or irenical attitude; just reciprocal witness in the pursuit of common progress in our quest and in our religious experience, so as to enable us to overcome at once prejudices, intolerance and misunderstandings.
Lastly, thinking back to the night in Bethlehem the cardinal said that evangelisation in the context of Asia’s inter-faith pluralism “reminds us of the Magi and their star. I see in the Magi,” he explained, “the vast multitude of those who believe in non Christian religions, those who follow their own stars (holy scriptures, sages, saints), those who carry in their heart the precious treasures placed therein by the Holy Spirit as seeds of truth. We Christians must accompany these seeds and make them ripen so that through inter-faith dialogue they get to the fullness of the truth, and this until the day—on this earth or afterwards—that they shall meet the “unknown God” that they worshiped without knowing, that is none other than Jesus Christ Our Lord, the Way, Truth and Life.”
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