Pope Urges Unity Among Religions to Aid Humanity

Pope John Paul II on Sunday met Tibet’s living Buddhist deity, the Dalai Lama, and called on “all the religions of the world to collaborate in the cause of humanity.”

The two religious leaders met for 20 minutes early in the second day of John Paul’s 10-day visit to India--the Roman Catholic pontiff attired in his usual, simple white cassock and the Buddhist leader, now living in exile in northern India, wearing an off-the-shoulder burgundy-colored robe.

The pontiff and the Dalai Lama--who fled his Chinese-occupied homeland in 1959--had met twice previously at the Vatican.

Later in the day, the Pope told a quietly respectful audience of about 10,000 mostly middle-class Indians of various faiths at Indira Gandhi Stadium here that “there is a need for all religions to collaborate in the cause of humanity and to do this from the viewpoint of the spiritual nature of man.

‘Fraternal Love’

“Today, as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees and Christians, we gather in fraternal love to assert this by our very presence,” he said.

Two weeks ago, in a little-reported remark during a ceremony at a church in Rome, the Pope proposed a world gathering of leading figures from all of the religions of the world in Assisi, Italy, the home of St. Francis, to share a retreat together during which they would meditate and pray for world peace.

Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said the pontiff is still waiting for replies to his call to the other religious leaders.

A minor incident threw a brief fright into the papal security force at the end of the Pope’s Sunday morning Mass in the stadium. As he was leaving the enclosed sports arena--the only site in New Delhi where he has met with the public in large number--a 23-year-old southern Indian who lives in New Delhi tossed a firecracker from the balcony onto the red carpet near the altar, about 50 yards from the smiling, waving Pope.

‘What Was Wrong?’

The man, identified as Dominic Ouseph by Indian police spokesmen, explained that he did it because “I was happy; what was wrong in doing it?”

Ouseph was released after questioning, and an official Indian government spokesman later displayed to Vatican journalists a letter that Ouseph had carried in his pocket, signed by a Jesuit physician and describing Ouseph as neurotic and in need of help.

The pontiff’s call for collaboration among the world’s religions in the cause of freeing people from poverty, suffering and the threat of war, was considered by members of John Paul’s entourage to be a serious reiteration of his earlier call for a joint peace vigil in Assisi.

One of the aims of the collaboration, he told the New Delhi audience, would be to “eliminate hunger, poverty, ignorance, persecution, discrimination and every form of enslavement of the human spirit.”

In an unusually forthright call for the right of every man to make his own religious choice, John Paul said, “To work for the attainment and preservation of all human rights, including the basic right to worship God according to the dictates of an upright conscience and to profess that faith externally, must become ever more a subject of inter-religious collaboration at all levels.”