Each is pan-human in its significance. None can be truly itself without the others. Each has a distinctive contribution to human development that can be made only by itself. Each must therefore be kept distinctive even as it reaches a universal diffusion among all peoples. For any tradition to withhold itself from the other societies of humanity or for any to exclude the other traditions is to vitiate and stultify its own tradition and its own developments, to condemn itself to sterile isolation from the only forces that can in these times give it life and creativity.
All human traditions are dimensions of each other.
If as Christians we assert the Christian dimension of the entire world, we must not refuse to be a dimension of the Hindu world, of the Buddhist world, of the Islamic world. Upon this universal intercommunion of peoples on a global scale depends the entire future human development. This is the creative task of our times, to foster this global meeting of the nations and of spiritual traditions. The global past of humanity is now the past of each person. We are no longer heirs simply of the Mediterranean traditions.