‘Interfaith apostle’ Raimon Panikkar dead at 91

NEW DELHI , Sept. 01, 2010, 14:00 Hrs (UCAN):

Comparative religion and interreligious dialogue expert, Professor Raimon Panikkar, has died at his home in Tavertet, near Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 26. aged 91.

Panikkar was born the son of an Indian Hindu father and a Spanish Catholic mother Nov. 3, 1918, NCR Online reports.

He received a conventional Catholic education at a Jesuit high school in Barcelona before launching his university studies in the natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, first in Barcelona and then in Madrid.

Shortly thereafter, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Panikkar was able to take advantage of his status as the son of a father who was a British citizen to go to the University of Bonn in Germany to continue his studies. When World War II started in 1939, Panikkar returned to Spain and completed the first of his three doctorates, this one in philosophy, at the University of Madrid in 1946.

At the urging of Opus Dei founder Escriva de Balaguer, he trained for the Catholic priesthood and was ordained in 1946.

Panikkar continued to be associated with Opus Dei for about twenty years, breaking effectively with the organization only in the early 1960s.

In late 1954, Panikkar visited India, the land of his father, for the first time.

It proved to be a watershed, a decisive reorientation of his interests and of his theology aided by his later meetings and close friendship with three monks, who like him were attempting to live and to incarnate the Christian life in Indian, predominantly Hindu and Buddhist forms: Jules Monchanin (1895-1957), Henri Le Saux, also know as Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973), and Bede Griffiths, the English Benedictine monk (1906-1993), NCR says.

One of Panikkar’s many striking sentences looking back on his life’s journey asserts: “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be a Christian.”