Road to peace runs through Washington

Lutheran, The, Feb 2004

ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson (below, right) confers with Theodore McCarrick, Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, B.C., during a Dec. 2 press conference for the National Interreligious Leadership Initiative for Peace in the Middle East.

Thirty-two leaders from many of the nation's largest Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups called upon the Bush administration to make more "active and determined" efforts toward Mideast peace. Despite divergent views on the issues, they united behind the "road map" to peace accepted by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which calls for an "unequivocal" end to violence and a Palestinian state by 2005.

The group said only the United States can fill the leadership vacuum in the peace effort. "There seems to be a perilous lack of progress on the road map that has left us rightfully impatient," Hanson said.