Is Pope Leo XIV changing how the Vatican approaches interreligious dialogue?
Church watchers have been wondering about the question at least since Nov. 29 of last year, when Leo XIV politely declined to pray in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque during his visit to Turkey.
A new document released this week confirms a shift – of emphasis, at least – in the Vatican’s approach to dialogue with other religious traditions.
One of the persistent criticisms of the Vatican’s approach to interreligious dialogue in recent decades has been that the Church has practiced a sort of “religious relativism” in the wake of the Vatican Council II’s teaching document on the issue.
The document issued this week appears to address that concern, while also preserving the hard-won good will and progress in dialogue with many different partners over the past six decades.
Titled “A Journey of Hope: Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate” and signed by the heads of three different Vatican departments, the document – officially a “Note” – was issued on Wednesday, Sept. 16.
The dicastery heads who signed the Note are Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández of Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Kurt Koch of Promoting Christian Unity (which also deals with relations with Jews), and Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad of Interreligious Dialogue.
The cardinals’ secretaries also signed the Note.
Pope Leo’s signature was not attached, but he approved the document Ex audientia die on June 22 and ordered its publication.
To look at the significance of “A Journey of Hope,” Crux Now spoke with three high-ranking individuals in different Vatican Media organizations and a curial official who often deals with Vatican-Israel relations.
All of the officials asked not to be named, since they did not have clearance to speak to the media.
The first thing to note is that “A Journey of Hope” deals mainly with Catholic-Jewish relations, which have blossomed in the wake of the Vatican Council II and its teaching document, Nostra Aetate.
“A Journey of Hope” notes that Nostra Aetate emerged in the aftermath of World War II and was initially conceived not as a document about dialogue with other religions, but specifically “as a response to the tragic consequences of antisemitism, which culminated in the Shoah.”
“Official and institutional Catholic-Jewish dialogue finds its foundation in paragraph 4 of the Declaration,” the Note explains, calling Nostra Aetate “the first magisterial statement that clearly recognizes the Jewish roots of Christianity.”
Theologians may quibble with that assertion – a great deal of work has been done to retrieve and recover the Jewish roots of Christian faith and worship preserved in the great Christian liturgical traditions – but Nostra Aetate really did transform Catholic engagement with the Jewish people.
Nostra Aetate also transformed Catholic engagement with other non-Christian religious traditions and with the members of many non-Christian traditions.
The mid-1960s also saw many changes in the place of Jewish people in world society, changes that were a very long time in coming and carried the weight of frequently gruesome history.
After the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple at Jerusalem in AD 70, and following decades of war between the Roman Empire and Jewish populations, most Jews lived far from the Holy Land and experienced varying degrees of tolerance and intolerance through centuries.
The original Zionism of the 1800s was a secular movement.
More religious Orthodox Jews opposed Zionism for that reason and only accepted it as a matter of fact, and then only after Israel gained its independence in 1948.
Israel wasn’t recognized by the Holy See when Vatican II happened in the 1960s, and many Jews were ambiguous about the Catholic Church: The Jewish Ghetto in Rome was only abolished when the Papal States fell to the new Kingdom of Italy in 1870.
The 1960s were a different world for other religions, too. Most newly independent Muslim countries had secular governments, as did other non-Christian nations like India.
In those heady years, many people saw interreligious dialogue as a way to end conflicts that often occurred between religious groups in various areas, usually based on misunderstandings about beliefs or different ethnic identities.
Anti-religious violence affected people of a great many religious traditions and practices, as well, and was committed systematically by Communist and other anti-religious authoritarian regimes.
The high-water mark of the interreligious dialogue upswell in the second half of the 20th century came during the pontificate of St. John Paul II, at the Meeting of the Leaders of the World Religions that took place in Assisi in October 1986.
“Your various religious creeds may have a similar injunction which meets an imperative of every human conscience,” Pope St. John Paul II said on Oct. 26, 1986.
“The observance of this golden rule is an excellent foundation of peace,” John Paul II also said on that occasion.
“Peace,” he said, “needs to be built on justice, truth, freedom and love. Religions have the necessary function of helping to dispose human hearts so that true peace can be fostered and preserved.”
The new Note from the Vatican says Pope Saint John Paul II’s pontificate was undoubtedly dedicated to promoting a genuine “dialogue between cultures” in the service of world peace, especially in the face of the growing number of acts of violence committed in the name of God.
Six decades after Nostra Aetate and 40 years after the Assisi meeting, however, the world has changed, again.
Religious violence – particularly anti-Christian violence – is on the rise, and it is now being committed by non-Christian rulers promoting their own, non-Christian (and frequently anti-Christian) policies and regimes.
Christians face oppression in Muslim, Hindu, and even Buddhist countries, as well as the remaining Communist nations. In Israel and in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, Christians are attacked by Jewish radicals.
In the Note, the Vatican acknowledges how the conflicts “that have erupted in the Middle East in recent years” – a reference to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response – have also left their mark on Jewish-Christian dialogue.
“Many channels of communication have been strained and continue to be tested by differing interpretations of the events that have unfolded,” the Note says, “interpretations that are often not unanimous even within the respective religious communities.”
Nevertheless, the Note did not shy away from delicate and controversial subjects.
It even broached the question whether Jews should be evangelized to become Christians, a current and long-running debate in Catholic circles with powerful bearing on Catholic-Jewish dialogue.
The Note provides a clear historical framework within which to think about the question, a framework with significant implications for the debate.
“Both modern Judaism and contemporary Christianity are based on the Word revealed in the Old Testament and trace their roots to the Judaism of Jesus’ time,” the Note says.
“Following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70,” the Note says, “Judaism gradually evolved primarily into Rabbinic Judaism, while early Christianity developed from the movement initiated by Jesus and his disciples, distinguishing itself from the various forms of Judaism over time.”
One official told Crux Now that statement was meant to address a decades-long debate in Catholicism about the theological relationship between modern Judaism and Christianity and to support the view that both religions evolved after the destruction of the Temple.
This is not an endorsement of “supersessionism” – the belief that Christianity replaces Judaism – but it does reject the “two-covenant theology” which claims Christianity is not for Jews.
The Note confirms that “dialogue and friendship” are a part of the life of Jesus’s disciples and points out how these involve “sorrow over the terrible persecutions suffered by the Jewish people, especially those in which Christians were involved.”
They also involve “the sharing of many ethical convictions together with a common concern for justice and the development of peoples.”
The Vatican document mentions the Assisi meeting four times, one of which sheds great light on the changing emphasis in interreligious dialogue.
In a paragraph that opens with Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks regarding Assisi, the Note then mentions “a well-known speech” in which Benedict cited the words of a Byzantine emperor who said that “spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.”
“Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul,” Benedict said, quoting the emperor.
That speech was Benedict’s Sept. 12, 2006, address in Regensburg, Germany, during which the German-born pontiff – an expert at Vatican II and one of the 20th century’s greatest theologians – quoted at length from Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos’s criticism of Islam.
That speech led to riots around the world.
“It was clearly obvious they knew what they were referring to,” one Vatican official – who was not involved in the Note’s publication – told Crux Now.
The three cardinals signing the Note gave pre-written interviews to Vatican Media about the message.
Only one mention of the Assisi statement made it into the published versions of the interviews.
“Pope Saint John Paul II showed, in Assisi and in many other encounters during his long and fruitful pontificate, that religions are not sources of division but essential actors in building lasting peace,” said Koovakad, the prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue.
According to the sources consulted by Crux Now, the interviews were submitted before the publication date and revised before publication. Officials removed segments on the Assisi meeting from one of the other cardinals’ interviews.
Since the beginning of 2026, Pope Leo has been using his General Audiences to look at the documents of Vatican II.
This Note – approved but not written by the pontiff – not only examines one of the most debated teaching documents of the Council, it pointedly reframes the debate in a way that seeks to keep the gains of the decades since Nostra Aetate while carefully addressing persistent concerns.
Whatever else one may say about the Note, it will be difficult to accuse it of “religious relativism” or anything like it.
“In his first address to the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See in 2025,” the Note states, “Pope Leo XIV recalled the three key words that must accompany every form of dialogue,” including – the thrust of the passage makes abundantly clear – interreligious dialogue.
Those words are: “Peace, justice, and truth.”
It is hard to find anything relativistic in that.
Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome
