Thousands of Christians, Muslims and Jews will gather in Sarajevo this weekend to pray for world peace at a Catholic Sant’Egidio community gathering, 17 years since the end of the Bosnian war.
“We will pray for peace in the entire world,” the Archbishop of Sarajevo, Cardinal Vinko Puljic, one of the event’s organisers, told journalists.
“We, who have the experience of war know very well what these prayers will mean,” he added in a reference to Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war.
The conflict, which saw Orthodox Christian Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslims fight each other, claimed some 100,000 lives. Relations between Bosnia’s three main religious groups remain deeply damaged 17 years on.
“After the war, we started to look for the path of dialogue. But, we did too little compared with what we could have done,” Puljic said, stressing that the prayer event would boost religious cooperation in the Balkan country.
Puljic, Bosnia’s top Islamic cleric Mustafa Ceric, Serb Orthodox Church Patriarch Irinej as well as the head of the Jewish community here, Jakob Finci, will speak at the start of the gathering on Sunday.
Some 200 religious leaders and officials will attend some 30 conferences notably on poverty, immigration, religion in Asia and the Arab world and dialogue between Christians and Muslims.
“We within the Sant’Egidio community have said for 25 years that no war is sacred. Only peace is sacred,” the president of the community Marco Imapgliazzo said.
He voiced hope that Bosnia’s capital would become a “model to live together in future.”
European Union President Herman Van Rompuy, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti as well as several political leaders from the Balkans will attend the event.
The Sant’Egidio community, which was founded in the Franciscan tradition in Rome in 1968, has frequently acted as a neutral mediator in international conflicts.
Inter-religious prayer for world peace in Sarajevo
