Vatican City - In its search for better relations with the Islamic world, the Roman Catholic Church is turning a spotlight on the role that culture can play in fostering understanding between peoples of different faiths.
Pope Benedict, launching a streamlining of the Vatican bureaucracy earlier this month, has given his culture minister, Cardinal Paul Poupard, the additional responsibility of heading the department for dialogue with non-Christian religions.
The move is more than a simple reshuffling of portfolios. A leading theologian before becoming Pope last April, Benedict has long thought contact with non-Christians should not focus only on religion, where agreement can be difficult if not impossible.
Culture -- not just art but the sum of a society's values, thoughts and behaviours -- provides a rich field for people of different backgrounds to learn to understand each other.
"Culture plays a fundamental role for relations between Christians and Muslims," said Poupard, 75, who now heads the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in addition to the Pontifical Council for Culture, which he has led since 1988.
"When he put me in charge of both departments, Benedict XVI clearly told me we had to develop the dialogue of men of culture with representatives of non-Christian religions," the French cardinal said in written response to questions from Reuters.
He recalled that the Pope told Muslim leaders in Germany last August that Christian-Muslim dialogue was "a vital necessity on which in large measure our future depends".
CONCERN ABOUT ISLAM
Senior Catholic officials have spoken in recent years with growing frankness of their concern about Islam, which immigrants have made the second-largest faith in many European states and radicals invoke to justify suicide bombings and other violence.
Cardinals at the Vatican for last Friday's consistory to elevate 15 more men to their exclusive group discussed the issue at a closed-door session on Thursday.
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard of France, home to Europe's largest Muslim minority, said they talked about values they shared with Muslims but also "human rights, the situation for Christians in those countries and the worrying sides of Islam".
Dialogue with Muslims can be complicated because Islam has no central authority and feels it has superseded Christianity.
Also, Muslims sometimes equate "Western" and "Christian," for example seeing the United States-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as attacks by Christian countries on Muslim states.
"This is a very damaging confusion," Poupard said.
"Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor John Paul II, never ceases to say this and show it by his acts, such as opposition to armed intervention in Iraq and the nomination of three Asian cardinals at the consistory, a Chinese, a Korean and a Filipino.
"The Church is not Western. It is catholic," he said, using the term derived from the Greek word for "universal".
The Vatican streamlining triggered much speculation in Rome because it began in mid-February with a terse statement that the former head of interreligious dialogue was being sent as Vatican ambassador to Cairo. This was seen in Rome as a demotion.
Unusually, no successor was named for Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, one of the Church's most experienced hands at dialogue with Muslims.
When the announcement that interreligious dialogue would be put under Poupard's responsibility finally came on March 11, it did not make clear whether the two councils would be merged.
oupard said the two pontifical councils would continue as separate entities but cooperate more closely, and that Fitzgerald's dialogue skills would be put to good use.
"Archbishop Fitzgerald will be on the front line in this regard in Cairo as nuncio to Egypt and to the Arab League," he said. The 22-member Arab League is based in Cairo.