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From the desk of the Secretary General
January 15, 2025
A friend sent me this article by Camilla Cavendish recently telling me that our work in inter-religious dialogue and encounter is becoming even more important given global trends––in case we had to be convinced of that! While Europe at first glance seems more and more secular, and secularists assume that atheism is the logical endpoint of prosperity, there’s an amazing growth of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. Islam continues to expand all over the world. There is a growth in many forms of spirituality as well. And so I certainly agree with her and have also found in my travels that “there is a space opening up in which people can start to talk about faith without being mocked. And for individuals to be able to acknowledge that strange sense of the sublime that human beings have felt since time immemorial. ... So it’s a good time to realize that far from living through a new age of reason, the coming decades are likely to see a growth in belief systems of all kinds.” January 9, 2025 I have been rummaging through my files to try to find this quote, now being in Rome and not having access to all normal resources. And I just stumbled on it, filed somewhere I had forgotten, a file I call “essential quotes.” I think this sets the tone pretty well for my own work and study. This is from Bruno Barnhart’s wonderful collation of Bede Griffiths’s Principal Writings, now unfortunately out of print with the demise of Templegate Publishers, but still very much alive on my bookshelf. Aside from his assiduous work at references and organizing Bede’s writings by theme, Bruno’s commentaries are as good as Bede’s own writings. Not only is the Mystery present in a different way in each tradition, but we are to learn from all of them, from the primal, tribal religions as well as the highly developed traditions of Hinduism and Christianity. The way to the realization of the Self, however is simple: it is the way of surrender: a surrender which proceeds through ever more interior stages. The personal way must also correspond to the traditional wisdom, according to one of the great traditions, of faith. The great religions begin with a mystical experience and then develop into complex systems of thought. It is necessary, if we would know the Mystery, that we penetrate through the exterior shell of the rationalized system to realize within ourself the original experience: that is, to participate in the divine life which has been shared among human beings. This is the kingdom of God and the essential message of all religion. External religion, with its rites, dogmas and institutional structures, exists only to bring people to the personal experience of this mystery. External forms, the ‘language’ of religion, must be continually revised to enable them to communicate the mystery to the people of a new age. The mystery, however, already dwells in the heart of every human being, and the church must awaken to this ‘universal revelation’(Bruno Barnhart, The One Light, 397). I often say about that word “only” that it’s an “only” you could say over and over again: External religion, with its rites, dogmas, and institutional structures, only only only only only exists to bring us to a personal experience of this mystery.
The Origins, Organization, and Activities of DIM•MID
The impetus for creating a special monastic organization to promote and coordinate interreligious dialogue came from a letter the late Cardinal Sergio Pignedoli, president of what is now the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, sent to the Benedictine Abbot Primate Rembert Weakland in 1974.
In his letter, Cardinal Pignedoli asked the monastic orders in the Church to take a leading role in interreligious dialogue because, as he put it,
Historically, the monk has always been the most representative figure of homo religiosus and thus represents a point of attraction and reference for Christians and non-Christians. The presence of monasticism in the Catholic Church is in itself a bridge spanning all religions. If we were to present ourselves to Buddhism and Hinduism, not to mention other religions, without the monastic religious experience, we would hardly be credible as religious persons.
Cardinal Pignedoli’s request led to the establishment, in 1978, of European and North American sub-commissions for interreligious dialogue within the Alliance for International Monasticism (A.I.M.), an organization that had been founded more than a decade earlier. A.I.M. had already sponsored several conferences to help monks and nuns in mission lands better understand the cultural and religious setting in which they now lived. One of those meetings, the one held in Bangkok in 1968, is especially remembered because it was there that the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, one of the pioneers of monastic interreligious dialogue, died accidentally.
In 1994, Abbot Primate Jerome Theisen arranged for the establishment of an independent general secretariat for interreligious dialogue. Although the secretariat was set up within the Benedictine Confederation, it would also serve the two branches of the Cistercian order. To emphasize the international character of this secretariat, it was called Dialogue Interreligieux Monastique Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Hence, the acronym DIM•MID.
Regional and linguistic commissions of DIM•MID have been established in Europe, North America, Australia, and Korea to promote interest and involvement in interreligious dialogue. In 2011 a multi-lingual on-line journal was founded. The name of the journal, Dilatato Corde, comes from a passage in the Prologue to the Rule of Benedict: “For as we advance in the religious life and in faith, our hearts expand (dilatato corde)and we run the way of God's commandments.” The journal provides a forum for individuals to describe and reflect on how their hearts have been expanded and their Christian faith deepened by knowledge of other religions, interreligious friendships, and understanding, and even adopting, spiritual practices from other religious traditions. If you want to be notified when new articles and announcements are posted, email the Associate Editor at wskudlarek@csbsju.edu and request that your email address be added to the list.
DIM•MID focuses on dialogue with monks and nuns of other religious traditions, whose monastic way of life, it should be noted, predates Christian monasticism by about a thousand years. A “Spiritual Exchange” program between Japanese Zen Buddhist monks and nuns and Christian monastic communities has been ongoing since 1979. A bi-lingual documentary film, “La voie de l’hospitalité” “Strangers No More,” highlights these exchanges, which have been a significant way for European monastic communities to offer interreligious hospitality
In recent years, DIM•MID has broadened its understanding of monastic interreligious dialogue to mean dialogue with other spiritual practitioners about their religious experience and observances—what the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue refers to as the fourth form of dialogue. Based on this way of understanding monastic dialogue, DIM•MID has formally entered into dialogue with Muslims, whose religious practices, especially the observance of set times for prayer each day, are strikingly “monastic.”
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 Fr. Cyprian Consiglio, OSBCam, a member and former prior of the monastery of New Camaldoli in Big Sur, California, became the third Secretary General of DIM•MID on October 1, 2014, succeeding Fr. Pierre François de Béthune, OSB (1994-2007) and Fr. William Skudlarek, OSB (2007-2024). |