At the Forum 2004 being held here, one session was entitled “Contributions of Pope John Paul II to the Interreligious Dialogue.”
One participant in the session, Meter Huff, who heads religious studies at Centenary College of Louisiana, in the United States, said: “The Pope is the man of the millennium, as he has reinvented the papacy and reinvented himself.”
A press statement issued by the forum’s organization said: “The Pope was the first pontiff to visit a synagogue and a Lutheran church; he fomented for the first time in 1986 an interreligious meeting and has worked fervently for the rapprochement with Protestantism.”
Ibrahim Ozdemir, professor of the history of philosophy at the University of Ankara, Turkey, said: “The Pope is today the voice of humanity’s conscience and he will be remembered in the future at the same level as Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalai Lama.”
