Pope Francis petitions UN for new annual secular celebration of ‘human fraternity’
In the latest sign of the importance Pope Francis attributes to his contentious Abu Dhabi interreligious initiative, he has now united with the Grand Imam of al-Azhar Mosque in Egypt, Ahmed el-Tayeb, in petitioning the United Nations to declare February 4 the annual World Day of Human Fraternity, the Vatican has announced.
February 4 is the anniversary of Pope Francis’s controversial joint declaration with the Sunni Grand Imam, seen by its critics as promoting religious indifferentism.
In a message delivered last week to United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, at the UN headquarters in New York, the Pope also invited the United Nations to organize, together with the Holy See and Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a World Summit on Fraternity, to be held in the near future.
The message was presented on December 4 to the UN Secretary-General by Christian, Muslim and Jewish members of the “Higher Committee on Human Fraternity,” established in August to achieve the objectives contained in the “Document on Human Fraternity and Living Together,” signed by Pope Francis and Ahmed el-Tayeb in Abu Dhabi, on February 4, 2019.
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