VATICAN CITY, April 13, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – With the high importance of dealing with Islam and Muslims’ issue, all candidates for the highest Papal seat have strongly expressed strong positions on the 1.2 billion Muslims and on whether the Roman Catholic Church’s relations with the Muslim world should be conciliatory or notch more confrontational.

The Vatican’s 155 cardinals will meet to select the next pope to succeed John Paul II, who has adopted a ground-breaking strategy for enhancing dialogue with Muslims.

Cardinal Angelo Scola is among the leading Italian candidates who adopts liberal ideas on bolstering dialogue with the Islamic world, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported Wednesday, April 13.

“Integration with the Muslim world will take place in Europe, because I cannot see where else it can happen,” Scola said recently, referring to the growing number of inter-marriages and contacts.

Rising as a star of the conservative camp, the 63-year-old patriarch of Venice has devoted himself to reviving his city’s reputation as a gateway to the east.

Recently, he launched a multilingual magazine called Oasis aimed at Christians living in Islamic countries and aimed at promoting “ties of understanding and friendship with the Muslim world.”

Scola has made a name for himself as one of the brightest minds in the Italian church with his theological scholarship, his past experience as head of Rome's Lateran University and his considerable body of writing on a range of cultural and ethical issues, according to AFP.

Pope John Paul II died Saturday, April 2, in his bed surrounded by his closest Polish aides.

During his reign, John Paul reached out to Muslims like no other pope.

In 1986, the late pope invited Muslims and followers of other faiths to Assisi to pray together for world peace.

In May 2001, he became the first pontiff to make an official visit to a mosque in the Syrian capital Damascus.

Among other candidates for the papal post is Cardinal Francis Arinze, from Nigeria, a man who grew up among Muslims and says there is no clash of cultures.

Like John Paul II, Cardinal Arinze has been a staunch supporter to reaching out other faiths, including Islam.

Arinze, who was for 18 years the head of the Pontifical Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, which directed the pope’s broad efforts to reach out to other religions, is deemed as an expert on Islam and in talking with Muslims.

“God can speak to us through other believers,” he told an interviewer several years ago, according to the New York Times.

“From sincere Muslims, Christians can learn, for example, the courage of sincere prayer. They pray five times a day, and no matter where they are -- be it the railway station or the airport -- they will do it. Whereas many Christians are ashamed of making the sign of the cross in a restaurant or pulling out a rosary on a train,” the US daily quoted him as saying.

Arinze headed the Vatican’s office of inter-faith affairs in 1985 and became a globe-trotting Church diplomat.

Many possible papal candidates also agree on the necessity to follow the path of the deceased pope on enhancing dialogue with the Muslim world.

Cardinal Dionigi Tettamanzi, 71, who is archbishop of Milan and is often considered the leading Italian papal candidate, has for years encouraged better relations between Catholics and the Muslim minority in Italy, according to AFP.

Following the footsteps of his predecessor in Milan, Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, Tettamanzi has urged Catholics to “go to the houses of Muslims” during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan.

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, 60, of Austria, was also among those who worked on Catholic-Muslim ties.

He said that dialogue with Muslims is important and necessary.

“For a true dialogue, one must share their innermost convictions,” he said.