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Religion has to play a major role in dialogue, to build peace out of the ruins of the September 11 attacks, said Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, according to the Catholic News Service.
The day of the attacks 10 years ago was "a monstrous day," he said during a presentation at Vatican Radio Sept. 6 of a new book on the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy.
Dialogue is the key to overcoming hatred and the risk of religious fanaticism, he said.
"If we want to build peace for humanity, we have to be able to develop a discourse in which the religious dimension becomes an active force for peace," he said.
Father Lombardi was one of a number of speakers presenting a new book written by a Vatican Radio journalist.
September 11: A Continuing Story, by Alessandro Gisotti, is a series of vignettes examining the tragedy from the point of view of people whose lives were directly affected by the disaster.
These include: a television journalist in New York; a firefighter; a Pentagon employee; the family of a young student who was killed in the plane crash near Shanksville, Pennsylvania; a Catholic priest whose church is one block from ground zero; and others.
The 90-page book is published only in Italian. Its foreword was written by US Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago.
FULL STORY
Post-9/11 world needs religion to be weapon of peace, spokesman says (Catholic News Service)
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