Cardinal Michael Fitzgerald MAfr has received the OBE in the 2022 New Year’s Honours List. He has received this for services to Interfaith and Interchurch Partnerships. At present Cardinal Fitzgerald is in community in Liverpool.
Congratulations, your Eminence.
I am appreciative and grateful for this award, particularly considering that my 'service to interfaith relations' has taken place mainly outside the UK. I think the award should really go to the Missionaries of Africa, the Society to which I belong, for having allowed me to have the necessary formation for this service which I exercised first within the framework of the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, and then to the Holy See, to Pope Saint John Paul II who, in 1987, appointed me Secretary of the Secretariat for Non-Christians (as it was then) and later in 2002 appointed me President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (as it had become). This gave me the possibility of engaging in fraternal relations on a wider scale than Christian-Muslim relations. Pope Francis, with his actions and his teaching - the jointly-signed Document on Human Fraternity and Fratelli Tutti - is encouraging us to continue building up these fraternal relations which our world badly needs. Quotation from Cardinal Michael on being awarded the OBE.