Following is an address given by Rebecca Cataldi for the American Youth Leadership Series on October 16, 2009 in Washington, DC.

Good evening and thank you for having me here.  I’m very happy to be part of the Call2Character movement, which is a movement to awaken the essence of America 's founding spirit and principles.  The beautiful thing about this movement is that it is not a “right-wing” movement or a “left-wing” movement.  It is not a Republican movement or a Democratic movement.  It’s not even a religious movement or based upon any one religious faith.  But it is a spiritual movement that seeks to revitalize the moral character of America and American values.

Now, American values can mean different things to different people, and this is perhaps fitting for a nation based on both diversity and the freedom to follow one’s own path.  But whether we always agree on how to put these values into practice or not, this movement seeks to begin a national conversation about the values that we as Americans want our nation to embody and how we can live up to these values, both as individuals and as a nation.  It seeks to reawaken these values in our national consciousness.

American values also encompass respect for the rights and dignity of every human being, respect for diversity, and the belief that it is possible to achieve one’s dreams through hard work and strength of character.  This includes the value of seeking out the greater good and trying to bring something good out of even the worst situations.  For example, shortly after 9/11, I visited the makeshift memorial that had been erected near Ground Zero.  Someone had painted a huge American flag and written on it the words: “Peace. Hope. Love.  We stand strong together.”

American values encompass compassion and care for others.  The poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty finishes with the words:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Think about that.  ‘Bring me the people who are hurting.  Bring me the people that no one else wants.  I will welcome them.  I will care for them.’  What a beautiful value.

Whatever your background, whatever your faith, whatever your political views, I believe these are values that most of us can get behind and embrace.  Are we living up to these values as a nation today?

Some people think that loving your country means you don’t care about other countries.  But to me, loving America means helping America live up to its values, and that includes service to others.  I feel that being a good American means helping others wherever they are, and striving to show the best face of America to the rest of the world.  For me, this has meant working for peace in the world.

I work for the International Center for Religion & Diplomacy, ICRD, which is an organization that does conflict resolution work around the world focusing on the role that religion and religious actors can play in resolving conflict and building peace.  Nowadays some people associate religion with contributing to conflict, but through our work we have seen the powerful role that religion can play in resolving conflict.  For the past five years, our biggest project has been in Pakistan, where we conduct teacher-training programs for leaders of the madrasas (Islamic religious schools) which promote curricular and pedagogical enhancement, with an emphasis on religious tolerance, human rights, and conflict resolution skills.

Those of us who joined this project did so for various reasons, but for me, a main reason was that I wanted to promote better relations between America and the Muslim world, and I felt two important ways of doing this were service and peacebuilding.  While we initially faced a great deal of suspicion in Pakistan as an American organization, these programs have found great success, and to date we have trained over 2200 madrasa leaders from more than 1400 madrasas throughout the country.

There are two main reasons that our programs have been successful, especially in parts of the country where American organizations are not always welcome.  One is because we engaged the madrasas as partners in a spirit of respect—personal respect and respect for their culture and traditions.  The second is because we engaged the madrasas in the spirit of faith.  While ICRD is not affiliated with any particular religion, we were founded on the philosophy of respect for religion and the role it can play in peacebuilding, and believe in the common values of peace taught in most every religion.  In the madrasa programs, the training is conducted by Muslim trainers and based upon Islamic teachings of peace and tolerance.

These values—respect for others, tolerance, and faith—are all core values upon which America was founded.  They also resonate strongly in many other societies, including Muslim societies.  Thus, we see that values such as these are not only “American” values, but are universal human values.  I am not a Muslim, but through this work I have come to realize how many core values America and Islam share in common.  For example, the Center for Understanding Islam, an American Muslim organization, put it well when it said:

“Our country is America and our faith is Islam… there is no need to choose between them. The reason for this is that the principles that governed and motivated the founders of America are identical with the principles developed by the classical scholars of Islam many centuries earlier…. Both rejected the exclusivism of clerical, ethnic, and class loyalties in order to give birth to new civilizations based on human dignity and on the human rights and responsibilities inherent in every person….”

In the training workshops, we promote tolerance and peacebuilding by engaging the madrasa leaders in reflection on what Islam teaches about conflict resolution and respect for diversity.  For example, the Qur’an says, “We . . . made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know one another.”  And “[A]mong His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the variations in your languages and your colors . . .” (Qur’an 49:13; 30:22).  These are the same values of respect for diversity and welcoming the other that America was founded upon.

But I believe it is faith that has the potential to be the most powerful bridge between America and the Muslim world, as it is so central to both our foundations.  And I have seen this through my work.  Even madrasa leaders who were typically very closed to outsiders responded positively to people of faith, whether they were Muslim or non-Muslim.  While our trainers are Muslim, in some programs madrasa leaders have gotten to interact with Christians like myself, and showed deep respect to us as people of faith, even though we differed in some theological beliefs.  Where conversations about politics have divided us, conversations about faith have brought us together.  In fact, one madrasa leader who visited the United States said: “American people will transform Islamic leaders…when they (Islamic teachers) see that these people are just as decent and faithful as we are in Muslim countries…they will face the reality that America as a whole does not hate all Muslims”.

When engaged in this manner, madrasa leaders have demonstrated their ability to become powerful agents for peace, from initiating their own peace programs, including programs to build cooperation between Muslims and Christians, to negotiating the release of the Korean Christians taken hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2007.  In addition, many of the madrasa leaders graduating from these programs have expressed a more positive attitude toward America, and some have even invited Americans to speak at their programs.  One of the many ways in which we are currently seeking to expand this program is by bringing selected madrasa leaders to the United States to study Islamic and religious education in America and develop relationships with American teachers and religious leaders.

Another project I started privately is the American-Islamic Friendship Project.  This project seeks to build better relations between the people of America and the Muslim world by collecting messages of peace and friendship from Americans to people in the Muslim world and from people in the Muslim world to Americans.  We seek to publish the messages in a book to be distributed in America and various Muslim countries.  I started this project after spending some time in Egypt.  Before I went, many of my fellow Americans encouraged my trip, but feared for my safety because they had an image of people in Arab and Muslim countries as being hostile to Americans.  In Egypt, I experienced overwhelming hospitality, but the same perception in reverse—most people were not hostile to Americans, but believed the Americans were hostile to Arabs and Muslims.

In reality, I believe the majority of Americans and people in Muslim countries do not have any hostility toward each other, yet many of us believe that the other is hostile toward us, causing fear and making it difficult to connect with and cooperate with each other.  So I started this project in order to start to dispel this misperception and to build greater understanding and friendship between the people of America and the Muslim world by allowing the voices of “ordinary” people to be heard by each other.  The response to this project in both regions has been wonderful.  Some people have said they have wanted to reach out to each other but previously weren’t sure how.  People have been both eager to share their messages with the other and deeply touched by the other’s messages to them.  And here again, faith has been a bridge.  So many of the messages include references to God or faith, even though the project was never framed as a religious one.  We have seen here again the universality of values of peace and faith.  One Pakistani madrasa leader who read some of the messages, including one by a six-year-old American girl, said, “If American children are writing to us about love and peace, then we have to respond in kind, not just with our words, but with our actions.”  I have the book of messages I have collected so far here tonight.  So if anyone is interested in learning more about this project, reading or contributing a message, or helping to connect me with people in other Muslim countries who would be interested to participate, please come and see me afterwards.

At a more local level, I have become active in the Interfaith Committee at my church, St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Arlington.  Some of the projects we have initiated are organizing a choir exchange with a Protestant church, participating in a Jewish seder meal at a synagogue, and recently hosting an iftar for members of local Muslim communities, which is a dinner to break the fast during Islamic holy month of Ramadan.  I have also become active in the 9/11Unity Walk, which commemorates the anniversary of 9/11 with a gathering of people from different faiths who pray together at various houses of worship to demonstrate solidarity against violence and unity as one human family.  To me, this is an example of America at its finest—people of diverse backgrounds coming together in the spirit of peace and faith, responding to a tragic situation with something constructive and hopeful.

I’ll finish with one more story.  In 2003, shortly before the Iraq War started, I participated in a peace vigil at Georgetown University, because I believed the war was contrary to American values.  There was another group on campus who believed America was making the right decision in going to war.  During the vigil, they hung an American flag in the square where we sat and began singing the national anthem.  The peace vigil participants stood up and began to sing with them.  At that moment, despite our strongly differing political convictions, we were united—in our love for America and in our desire for it to do the right thing in the world, even though we disagreed about what that was.  This is what the Call2Character Campaign is about—not divisive politics or ideologies, but a common goal—of helping America live up to its values and reawakening the moral character of our nation.

What if government officials, before deciding on policies, really took time to discuss and reflect on whether the policy would be truly living up to the values on which America was founded?  What if we, as individuals, more often asked ourselves: what kind of Americans do we want to be, and what do we want our nation to symbolize, to ourselves and to the world?  It is this national conversation and national consciousness that the Call2Character Campaign calls us to, and I look forward to working with others to inspire a reawakening of our nation’s moral character.

Thank you.

Rebecca Cataldi is founder of the American-Islamic Friendship Project.