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Inter-religious meeting in Ur

On March 6, 2021, as planned, Pope Francis met with many Muslim religious representatives in the Plain of Ur. Ur was the city where Abraham was born. There he delivered a speech exhorting mankind to abandon all wars and to embrace universal fraternity.

He also declared that, imitating Abraham, we must leave behind our status quo life of attachments and enter the path of concessions. This way would lead to peace and love where we all need one another. We should stop considering others as "them" rather than "us;" we cannot be "against" someone but "for" everyone. Only by taking these steps can we be fully fraternal and achieve peace on earth.

This message of peace and love was delivered in a place that appears to be where was the 4.000-year-old Sumerian temple dedicated to the goddess Inanna or Ishtar. We can see from second to the fifth rows below the beginning of its reconstruction, very close to the place the papal ceremony occurred.

It is seems that it is not a coincidence that Ishtar was the goddess of war and love... Indeed, in the Ur of Abraham's time there were different temples for the many pagans gods. One was the Ziggurat or temple of the god and goddess Nanna and Ningal his wife; another was the temple dedicated to their daughter Inanna or Ishtar.

After the Assyrians and the Babylonians took the Summerian lands, Inanna became Ishtar, last row, and its cult became the most important among their gods. It spread to the Phoenicians and Cannanites under the name of Astarte, to the Greeks under the name of Aphrodite, to the Romans as Venus, and to many occult sects and the Jewish kabbalah as Lilith.

As the goddess of love, Ishtar became popular as the goddess of the prostitutes. This fame reflected the symbolic moral corruption of Babylon, which entered the Bible in opposition to the fidelity of Jerusalem.

So, if it is confirmed that the place where Francis delivered his message is actually the ancient temple of Ishtar, we could say that he chose this biblical symbolism to give a deeper meaning to his words...

Photos from L'Osservatore Romano & the Internet

Posted March 7, 2021

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