Fr. Elias Mallon, SA

Fr.  Elias Mallon is involved in the Roman Catholic/Christian-Muslim dialogue and issues of interreligious cooperation for conflict transformation and peacebuilding in the Middle East.  He is the External Affairs officer for the Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA), which supports charitable, educational, health and development projects in the Middle East, Ethiopia, Eastern Europe and southern India. Servant of God Fr. Paul Watson helped found CNEWA in 1923.

Fr. Mallon, a native New Yorker, was first professed as a Franciscan Friar of the Atonement in 1963 and ordained in 1971. He obtained a licentiate degree (STL) in Old Testament Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Languages from the Catholic University of America. He researched and wrote his dissertation at Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen, Germany. He taught Old Testament at the Washington Theological Union and American University in Washington, D.C. He taught Ancient Near Eastern Languages at the University of Washington in Seattle. He also worked for the then Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity (now Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) as its faculty representative at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey in Switzerland. From 1989-2001 he was Director of the Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute in New York City.

He has been involved in the Roman Catholic/Christian-Muslim dialogue on the local, national and international levels since 1985 and published several articles and two books on Islam:  “Neighbors: Muslims in North America” (New York: Friendship Press, 1989) and  “Islam: What Catholics Need to Know (Washington, D.C.: National Catholic Education Association, 2006), which won second prize at the Catholic Press Association of the U.S. and Canada in 2007. He also has been awarded several prizes by the association for articles he published in Ecumenical Trends, America,ONE and Origins. He has worked with Westminster Press on several programs in its Thoughtful Christian Series. Since 2006 he has been a non-governmental organization (NGO) representative at the United Nations for Franciscans International and later the Catholic Near East Welfare Organization (CNEWA), where he works with peace, justice and freedom of religion issues. He is on the NGO Israel-Palestine Working Group.

In November 2014, Fr. Mallon was invited by the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development to appear as a witness to share his views on the horrific violence, religious persecution and dislocation perpetrated in Iraq, Syria and the region by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

He also prepared a study guide for church leaders on pilgrimage and fact-finding tours in the Holy Land and Middle East. In August 2023 he was part of a panel with Shi’ite scholars at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. He met with the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, one of the leading Ayatollahs in the world whom Pope Francis visited on his pilgrimage to Iraq in 2021. In February 2024 Fr. Mallon spoke on “Two Thousand Years of Christianity in Mesopotamia” at the Los Angeles Religious Education Conference in Anaheim, California.

His published articles include: “Will Democracy Bloom? A Closer Look at the Arab Spring,” America, Oct. 10, 2011; “Democracy Is Not Enough,” America, Dec. 9-13, 2013; “Contesting the Caliphate,” America, July 17, 2014; “The Eastern Catholic Churches Before and After Vatican II,” Origins, Nov. 6, 2014; and “Who Speaks for Islam,” America, March 16, 2015.  His articles in ONE, a publication of CNEWA, include: “The Ninety-nine Beautiful Names of God,” September 2009; “Ramadan Observed,” September 2011; “Religious Minorities in the Middle East,” March 2012; “Ecumenism,” Summer 2013; “The Fundamental Agreement,” Winter 2013; “A Global Peril: the state of religious freedom today,” America, Feb. 29, 2016; “Sykes-Picot and the making of the modern Middle East,” America, May 17, 2016.