Canberra’s Roman Catholic Archbishop, Mark Coleridge recently pinpointed an issue in The Age newspaper that is the source of a great deal of tension between Christians and Muslims (Lost in Translation by Barney Zwartz, 19th September 2006). He said that Pope Benedict believed that religious freedom should not be a one sided phenomenon: “It’s not enough for the West to accommodate Islam, but Islamic countries have to accommodate Christianity. There’s a huge mosque in Rome, but in many Muslim countries it’s almost impossible to practise Christianty publicly.” While Muslims in Australia are accorded total freedom of religious expression and worship, Christians and Jews and people of other faiths, living in the majority Muslim countries, from which these Muslims originally came, are denied such freedom. In fact, in many cases such people are persecuted for their religious practice. Australian Muslim leaders will gain far more credibility when they not only assert their right to religious freedom in Australia, but begin to defend the rights of religious groups other than Islam to worship publicly in the countries from which they came.

(Letter sent to The Age Newspaper by a friend. October 2006)