Vatican Rebuff to Spanish Muslims

The Vatican will not allow Muslims to pray once more in the Mezquita, the former mosque that is now the cathedral of Cordoba, telling them they must "accept history" and not try to "take revenge" on the Catholic church.

"We, too, want to live in peace with persons of other religions," Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, told the Vatican's AsiaNews agency. "However, we don't want to be pushed, manipulated and go against the very rules of our faith."

Mgr Fitzgerald criticised the authorities of the southern Spanish city for lobbying to have the building, once one of the world's biggest mosques, opened to Muslim prayer.

"[They] have not the necessary theological sensitivity to understand the church's position," he said.

He claimed Spanish Muslims who had been publicly lobbying for the right to pray had yet to make a formal request to the Vatican.

The archbishop said the Vatican had been careful not to demand similar rights at mosques which were once Catholic churches - though he acknowledged that Pope John Paul II had prayed at a mosque at Damascus in Syria.

"The Holy Father visited the Ummayade mosque in Damascus, praying in front of the tomb of St John the Baptist. But he did not ask to celebrate mass," he said. "One has to accept history and go forward."

He pointed out that Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, another important building with a past as both a Christian place of worship (in its time centre of the Orthodox church and the biggest church building in the world) and a mosque, was now a museum:"It is difficult to have Christians and Muslims mixing and sharing a common [civic and religious] life, despite being driven by wanting to go back in time or take some form of vengeance."

Although the archbishop said it had been left up to church authorities in Cordoba to answer the petitions for Muslim prayer, he made it clear that the Vatican did not want to open churches up to other religions.

"If it is a Catholic chapel with the blessed sacrament inside, it should not be used to for prayer services of another religious tradition," he said.

He admitted Muslims had prayed in the Vatican but "they do not lay claim to it".

The site of the cathedral was a Roman temple before becoming a church under the Visigoths, and then a mosque during the Arab conquest. It became a cathedral after the city was recaptured in 1236.

Spanish Muslims had asked that, as the cathedral only occupied part of the former mosque complex, which is the third biggest in the world, they be allowed to pray in another part of the building.