Haifa's secret

Continuing in her travels with a group of bishops from Europe and North America on an annual pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Vatican Radio's Philippa Hitchen visits the town of Haifa and tells us why it sets an example for other communities in the area...
"After an early start, the bishops began their day celebrating Mass in a tiny chapel on Mount Carmel known in Arabic as El-Muhraqa or The Sacrifice. It’s the place where the prophet Elijah challenged the followers of Baal to see who was worshipping the one, true God. (If you don’t know the story, you can read about the dramatic events in 1 Kings chapter 18). Perched high on the hilltop with breathtaking views across northern Galilee and the south Lebanon border, the site is a place of pilgrimage for Christians, but also Moslems, Druze and Jews, the four communities that live relatively peacefully together in this region.
So what is their secret? Why is it that less than 2 hours drive from Jerusalem, these communities have found a measure of social, political and religious harmony that is unimaginable elsewhere in the country? Well, according to the deputy mayor of Haifa who met with the bishops this morning, economic development is certainly part of the answer. Haifa is a thriving port city, built around a picture postcard bay, so tourism is a big industry and the city also boasts the biggest IBM plant outside the United States. They’re also rightly proud of their education system, with a prestigious university and three Nobel prize winners coming from the city in recent years.
But education is also a key issue for the Christian Churches in this region, as the bishops heard during an afternoon interfaith encounter in an impressive six-storey school near Haifa set up by the globe-trotting Greek Melchite Archbishop Elias Chacour. Reflecting on the aftermath of the papal visit to the Holy Land in 2009 and the more recent interfaith meeting in Assisi, Jewish, Moslem, Druze and Christian leaders reaffirmed their conviction that educating the next generation in the common values of their different faiths, rewriting their texts books and finding ways of allowing them to discuss difficulties together – all these are essential for a future of peace in the region.
To spell out the Catholic Church’s endorsement for this action plan, the Latin Bishop of the Galilee, Giacinto Marcuzza, handed out copies of Pope Benedict’s World Peace Day message, this year focused on the importance of education for justice and peace – an English copy for the Israeli municipal authorities and Arabic versions for leaders of the local Moslem and Druze communities.

So overall a positive meeting and I would say a welcome respite for the bishops as they headed back to Jerusalem through the checkpoint for meetings with the Palestinian authorities and discussions on the growing phenomenon of settler violence against the Arab population".
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