The Making of a Joint Buddhist-Catholic Statement

Buddhist-Catholic relations were strained by the end of 1994 and early into 1995 by two events. First was the publication of Pope John Paul II's Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf, 1994), which contained a controversial chapter on Buddhism. The second event was the boycott of the Pope's visit to Sri Lanka by the Buddhist leadership of that country precisely because of what was said about Buddhism in that chapter of the Pope's book. In view of these two events, both Buddhist and Catholic leaders around the world expressed the desire to hold a dialogue, at the highest international level of encounter, between their two religious traditions. Responding to this desire, the Vatican organized its very first encounter with the Buddhist world at the highest level of the church. In the spring of 1995, Cardinal Francis Arinze, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID), invited ten Buddhist representatives from around the world to meet with him, three other members of the Vatican's PCID, and ten Catholic scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States. The Buddhist, participants both monastic and lay scholars, represented Buddhist traditions in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, Tibet, Japan, and the United States.