Posted on 12/04/2025 11:47:21 AM PST by ebb tide
Editor’s Note: The following article is from a speech given by Bishop Marian Eleganti at the Rome Life Forum, December 4, 2025.
On January 25, 1986, Pope John Paul II announced the first multi-religious World Day of Prayer for Peace, which took place on October 27 of the same year. It was attended by 150 representatives of various religious groups, including the Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, representatives of Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, and Sikhism, Inamullah Khan from the Islamic World Congress, and the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, to name but a few.
Further meetings followed with different emphases: in 1993, 2002, 2011, and 2016.
As far as the interfaith meetings in Assisi were concerned, there were concerns from curia officials and bishops from the very beginning. They wondered whether this meeting of non-Catholic and non-Christian religious leaders was not dangerously close to “the heresy of syncretism.”[1] Above all, did these meetings not ipso facto place all religious traditions on the same level? “How could the pope pray with men and women who worshipped a different God or many gods?”[2] In fact, this meeting was the idea of John Paul II.
READ: Pope Leo urges Christians to ‘be less fearful’ of Islam, encourages ‘dialogue’ with Muslims
As Cardinal Etchegaray explained, the pope was convinced that the world’s religious traditions had the potential to bring peace to international conflicts.[3] At this point, the question immediately arises as to whether the opposite is not also the case. Let us consider today the extent of the persecution of Christians, especially in Muslim countries, but also on the part of nationalist Hinduism, to name just two examples. The intention was that each representative of his religion should pray in his own way and in his own place, and only then come together, because “John Paul was clear that this could not mean a universal common prayer, because that would have been true syncretism and was therefore impossible – not only for himself, but also for others.”[4] Fasting was also to be observed, and Pope John Paul chose Assisi as the location so that he could travel there as a pilgrim.
With regard to the Fourth Assisi Meeting of World Religions, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his opinion in a letter dated March 4, 2011, to Lutheran pastor Peter Beyerhaus: “In any case, I will do everything possible to ensure that a syncretistic or relativistic interpretation of the event is impossible and that it remains clear that I continue to believe and profess what I had reminded the Church of in my letter ‘Dominus Jesus.’”[5]
This was probably exactly what the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith feared at the time of the first meeting, and these fears have clearly not dissipated over the years. The power of images, which were less nuanced than Ratzinger’s theological clarifications, should not be underestimated. The then-prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, wrote in 2011 about the power of images:
There are a number of dangers that such an encounter could bring in terms of the mass media communication of the event, of which – as it is clear – the pontiff is well aware. The means of mass media communication will say, even with the images alone, that all religions have come together to ask God for peace. A poorly formed Christian could draw from this the gravely mistaken conclusion that one religion is as good as another, and that Jesus Christ is one of the many mediators of salvation.[6]
As with Vatican II, mutatis mutandis, the so-called ”Spirit of Assisi” (cf. Enzo Bianchi; Andrea Riccardi; Cardinal Etchegaray; the Patriarch of Constantinople) offered a much-invoked but extremely vague and undifferentiated possible legitimation of relativistic tendencies in the Church, which “Dominus Jesus” ultimately sought to counter. In any case, Cdl. Ratzinger did not attend the first meeting, and his reservations have grown rather than diminished over the years. For him, religions are not interchangeable symbols of the one invisible God behind everything, whom we all basically mean, and we are not all children of God simply because we belong to the human race by nature. In this regard, Francis has now gone much further than his predecessors. We will discuss this in detail later.
One thing is certain: the Lord’s command to preach the Gospel to all nations and make them His disciples (Mt 28:18-20; Mk 16:15f; Lk 24:46f; Jn 20:21; Acts 1:8) remains ignored in many places, and has been for decades. Many people recognize the legitimacy of development aid, but not the necessity of Christian mission, which they decisively reject.
Religious individualism and multicultural pluralism, which are ipso facto relativistic, have created a social atmosphere characterized by a great aversion and animosity toward claims to truth. The belief that all religions are just different paths to the same goal is widespread. There should no longer be any religion that claims to be in possession of the (supposedly “leased”) truth.
READ: Pope Leo warns German bishops not to silence faithful who fear speaking against Synodal Way
Unfortunately, Pope Francis’ statements at the Catholic Junior College in Singapore on September 13, 2024, go in this direction and, with all due respect to the pope, are objectively scandalous. I quote:
One of the things that struck me most about you young people, about you here, is your capacity for interreligious dialogue. And that is very important, because when you start arguing, ‘My religion is more important than yours…,’ ‘Mine is true, yours is not true…’ Where does that lead? Where…? [Someone answers: ‘Destruction’]. That’s right. All religions are a path to God. They are – I’ll make a comparison – like different languages, different idioms, to get there. But God is God for everyone. And because God is God for everyone, we are all God’s children. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is that true? There is only one God, and we, our religions, are languages, paths to God. Some are Sikhs, some are Muslims, some are Hindus, some are Christians, but they are different paths. Understood?[7]
This is a view that I already opposed in the 1990s in a seminar on pluralistic religious theology in Salzburg.
Religious pluralism opposes any ”ideology“ that is to be ‘imposed’ on all people – again, an assumption – as the “only valid” or “only salvific” one. An attitude that helps people but does not seek to “convert” them is accepted. “Mission” appears here as a form of presumption and pride.
One of the leading thinkers of feminist theology, Rosemary R. Ruether, classified the universalist conception of Christianity, which requires “mission” to spread the “good news,” as pure “imperialism.” Christian theologians also place Christ on a par with other mediators of salvation (cf. the “Christology” of the American presbyter John Hicks). Jesus’ claim to absoluteness is “a central problem” for their theology[8] and, in their view, requires a new evaluation in the context of other visions of divine reality, so-called intuitions of God. Perry Schmidt-Leukel is also a proponent of this concept.
Jesus’ claim to absoluteness, which underlies the Great Commission or missionary idea, thus becomes a major stumbling block again: “But we preach Christ crucified: to Jews a stumbling block, to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, God’s power and God’s wisdom.” (1 Cor 1:23) For this reason, in recent decades the concept of mission has been replaced by the idea of partnership and dialogue (between religions), which carries less “negative baggage,” or by “intercultural learning.” It is clear that today we misunderstand tolerance as a renunciation of convictions and claims to truth.
As a result, “mission” can mean anything (commitment to the climate or to barrier-free and borderless migration), except convincing someone of the truth – in our context, of Jesus Christ. This also seems to have been the view of Pope Francis.
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However, “dialogue” as the epitome of a relativistic credo, which from the outset and in principle does not grant any interlocutor the possibility of a deeper insight into the truth than the other, makes precisely this dialogue superfluous and meaningless. Socrates says in Phaedo (91, a-c): “It is only beautiful to be convinced of something if it is also true!” [10] Yes, the question arises: Can one even adhere to a religion whose truth (indeed, excellence) one is not really convinced of (because otherwise one would have to honestly give it up or change it)?
Dialogue and proclamation are, of course, interrelated and, in this sense, are not really alternatives (cf. Document of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue of May 19, 1991). Dialogue includes witness to the faith, while proclamation presupposes dialogue. But the work of conviction is done by God alone. From Him comes the demonstration of spirit and power that needs no persuasion. “My message and proclamation was not persuasion through clever and wise words, but was connected with the demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith would not be based on human wisdom, but on the power of God” (1 Cor 2:4).
This is right and pleasing to God our Savior, who wants all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper time. And I have been appointed a herald and an apostle – I am telling the truth, I am not lying – and a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth. (1 Tim 2:3-7)
From here, the question arose for me as to what Francis understood by proselytism, which he repeatedly and decisively rejected, a polemic that, in my opinion, amounted to a rejection of mission. Did he understand mission to mean the propagation of a multicultural, tolerant, and dialogical kingdom of peace, where all opposites and contradictions coexist with open borders and desirable social justice? A kind of inner-worldly kingdom of God of universal brotherhood without disturbing questions of truth and therefore without the explicit mediation of Jesus Christ, at most as a moral example?
Religions do not all mean the same thing when they talk about God or believe they have experienced him! And I also do not believe that they all go in the same direction. Nor am I convinced that the world’s major religions are just different variations of God’s self-communication.
When the Fathers spoke of the seeds of truth that also exist among the pagans, they did not primarily mean their religions, but above all their highly developed (Greek) philosophy. Think of ancient philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, or Asian teachers of wisdom such as Confucius.
However, the Fathers considered pagan religions to be demonically inspired. Their view on this is based on Holy Scripture: 1 Cor 10:20: “What the pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God.” 1 Cor 10:20. “All the gods of the pagans are demons.” Ps 95(96):5. From this, many Fathers deduced that behind the cults of idols stood not merely human error, but a spiritual power that obscured the true God. Thomas Aquinas (13th century) teaches that there are traces of truth in pagan religions (e.g., natural knowledge of God), but that these have been corrupted or perverted by demonic influences and human error. Summa Theologiae, II-II, q.94, a.4: “The demons caused people to worship creatures as if they were divine.”
READ: Pope Leo XIV issues joint blessing with Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew
The relativization of the person of Jesus Christ promoted in pluralistic religious theology and the resulting new conception of a theology of religions is based on the a priori exclusion of the possibility of God incarnating Himself in a unique, unrepeatable, and lasting way in history and thus being able to reveal Himself in a generally binding and understandable way. “Revelation” in the theological sense must therefore not be dissolved into vague “mysticism” of a universal religious nature. It follows that the expressions of religious consciousness in this regard cannot be indiscriminately attributed to the omnipresent work of the Spirit of God in an interreligious context. It cannot be that in Jesus Christ the same God testified to His beloved Son (cf. Mt 3:17, 17:5; Mk 1:11, 9:7, 12:6; Lk 3:22; 2 Pet 1:17) and a few centuries later, through Mohammed, supposedly the seal of the prophets, proclaimed that God has no son (!), as the anti-Christian and anti-Trinitarian polemic of the Koran would have it.
From an intercultural perspective, the Gospel is the salt of the earth and the light of the world. It reveals something that cannot otherwise be seen. In this sense, it is also a critique of religion. As Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well shows, claims to validity without compromise (“Salvation comes from the Jews”; “the true temple is in Jerusalem,” cf. John 4:22f) can coexist with a capacity for dialogue and respect for other ways of thinking. This conversation shows, with all due caution, how to move the other person to a deeper insight that it does matter with whom or with what faith one is dealing in the confrontation with a religious claim: “If you knew what God’s gift was and who it was that said to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” (John 4:10)
In comparison with this realization, Paul then gave up everything: “I consider everything a loss because the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, surpasses everything. For His sake, I have given up everything and consider it rubbish in order to gain Christ.” (Phil 3:8) One inevitably thinks of Jesus’ parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. A man found it and hid it again. Then in his joy he sold all he had and bought that field” (Mt 13:44). The Gospel of John sees in the knowledge of Christ the eternal life par excellence: “This is eternal life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). But how can anyone know Him if no one proclaims Him, the rhetorical question of the apostle (cf. Rom 10:14)?
The passage in the Abu Dhabi Declaration that refers to a God-given plurality of religions has attracted considerable criticism. It states: “Pluralism and diversity in religion, color, gender, ethnicity, and language are a wise divine will with which God created human beings.”
If you apply this sentence to Islam, it immediately becomes clear how wrong it is. For Islam is, by its own admission, an anti-Christian religion. Christianity and Islam cannot coexist, not only in terms of truth theory, but also in practice. This is also evident in the fact that Islam has always persecuted and oppressed Christianity wherever it prevails, causing it to disappear. Most Christian martyrs today die at the hands of Muslims. It goes on to say: “Furthermore, we declare – with determination – that religions never incite war and do not call for feelings of hatred, hostility, extremism, violence, or bloodshed. These catastrophes are the result of deviation from religious teachings and the political exploitation of religions.” This is nothing less than a distortion of history and blindness to reality, if not deliberate deception.
Do all religions teach non-violence in the same way as the Gospel? Isn’t Islam’s true problem in an interreligious context precisely its relationship to violence? The claim that “religions never incite war, arouse feelings of hatred, hostility, or extremism, or call for violence or bloodshed” is blatantly false. It contradicts in particular the founding documents and history of Islam (the Koran and Hadith), which explicitly call for violence and have always used violence. In any case, the idea of seeing every human being, including Christians, Jews, and unbelievers (kuffãr), as a brother is completely foreign to Islam.
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It is doubtful whether the Abu Dhabi Declaration could reinterpret Islam’s self-image, which divides the world into a house of peace (Dãr al-Islãm), where Islam reigns, and a house of war (Dãr al Harb), where this is not the case. Christians, on the other hand, have internalized the parable of the Good Samaritan, on the basis of which they see their neighbor in every stranger. This is absolutely normative and imperative for them, and it is also one reason why Christianity, like no other religion, has contributed to the humanization of the world. Christ Himself, in the parables of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) and of the Son of Man’s judgment of the nations (Matthew 25:31-46), showed solidarity with every human being who, in principle and always, can become my neighbor.
Jesus died for all people. For Christians, this establishes a qualitatively different relationship than Islam has with all people, regardless of their faith and worldview. Christian charity even goes so far as to embrace enemies (inclusion). Such an idea, e.g., to love even the so-called “enemies” or “opponents” of Islam, seems completely unreasonable and incomprehensible to Islam. What can an explanation from an authority that is not normative for all Muslims and for Islam as a whole change about this? Why is Jesus’ teaching to love all people, which must implicitly be regarded as the actual source of the idea of universal humanity (brotherhood) between all people, not mentioned by name in the Abu Dhabi Declaration? After all, Jesus is also considered a prophet in Islam, without, paradoxically, His teachings and self-image being truly adopted.
Only Muslims are true (faith) brothers to the believing Muslim. They form the umma (community of faith). In Islam, people of other faiths and non-believers are per se second-class citizens (human beings), because in the Islamic worldview, human beings were created as Muslims (Islam being the original religion of Adam and Abraham), and according to Muslim belief, Jews and Christians have distorted the true faith in the course of history. Otherwise, they would have remained Muslims. This establishes a fundamental inequality between them and devout Muslims, which the Abu Dhabi document will not eliminate, nor, I believe, will Fratelli tutti (2020).
From a Christian perspective, the unique and universal mediatorship of Jesus Christ is obscured in the Abu Dhabi Declaration due to the double signature. This is surprising from a Christian point of view. As always, the new brotherhood comes at the expense of the universal mediatorship of Jesus Christ: His claim to truth and His mediatorship must take a back seat. This is the prerequisite for the declaration. Otherwise, the grand imam would probably not have signed the Abu Dhabi Declaration. It would be more honest to speak of charity rather than brotherhood, which in Christianity is based on faith in Christ, baptism or rebirth from the Spirit and water, and not on the will of man, i.e., not on natural grounds.
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The Abu Dhabi Declaration propagates a kind of secular “Kingdom of God” concept that is not based on the Christian faith (rebirth from the Spirit and water), but on a brotherhood that is foreign to Islam but nourished by Christian roots. It would be better to remind Muslims of human rights, which are still subject to Sharia law and therefore cannot be universalized in this way. The grand imam would have been better off signing up to universal human rights without reservation.
The brotherhood of the Abu Dhabi Declaration is presented as a naturalistic, universal human and political realm of mutual tolerance. Such humanitarian, essentially purely political concepts of peace have been proclaimed repeatedly throughout history and often implemented in a revolutionary, i.e., violent, manner. In reality, they are formed from fragments of the Christian faith or the Gospel. To date, these attempts have all failed and have not delivered what they promised and strove for. This is because they did not convert the human heart to the truth about God and man, or to Jesus Christ, but followed human theories that were falsified by their own revolutionary history at the cost of acts of violence on an unprecedented scale and millions of deaths (cf. The Black Book of Communism).
The only one who is God and who can truly renew the human heart from within is Jesus Christ and His Gospel.
Ironically, in Soloviev’s story of the same name, the all-forgiving Antichrist promises such an egalitarian, relativistic, ecumenical kingdom of peace in which none of the participants in the discourse need sacrifice the slightest bit of their own views for the sake of absolute truth, but rather hear from the Antichrist exactly what they want to hear and what they already believe.
The Abu Dhabi Declaration declares all people to be children of God because they belong to humanity, while the Gospel of John links sonship of God to faith in Christ and baptism (rebirth of the Spirit and water; not by the will of man). This also applies to the concept of universal brotherhood (Fratelli tutti, October 3, 2020).
Cardinal Américo Aguiar, who coordinated the last World Youth Day (2023) as auxiliary bishop of Lisbon, caused a stir with his statement: “We do not want to convert young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that.” He said that the “main message” of this event was: “I think differently, I feel differently, I organize my life differently, but we are brothers and sisters, and we will build the future together.”
Aguiar rightly links this view to Pope Francis’ programmatic social encyclical Fratelli Tutti (2020). For the sake of the indispensable mediation of Jesus Christ, we should not speak of universal brotherhood, but of charity in the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan. “I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
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According to Jesus’ Great Commission, we are to make all people His disciples. A Catholic Church that renounces this is no longer Catholic. Once again: as human beings, we are not children of God from birth, but His creatures. We must first accept and affirm our sonship. It is offered to us in Christ. Our faith is the adequate response to this offer and the condition for admission to this sonship in Jesus Christ. Christ gives us the power to become children of God: if we believe in Him and are baptized! Anyone who wants to include everyone and exclude no one at the price of pushing Christ, the Son of God and universal truth, the salvation of the nations, the mediator and exclusive door to God, into the background or placing him on a par with other options does not deserve the name “Christian.”
The true light that enlightens every human being came into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, but the world did not recognize Him. He came to His own, / but His own did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, / He gave the right to become children of God, / to all who believe in His name, who were born not of blood, / nor of the will of the flesh, / nor of the will of man, / but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:9-14).
This alone is the basis of our brotherhood, nothing else.
Ping
Finally a bishop that gets it right about Christianity and Jesus.
Well at least there’s one true catholic bishop left.
Elegantily stated
I get the pun!
Nice one.
Yes, Yeshua said love your enemies. He did not say to be like them. He said it in the same vein that he showed love for the sinner, but nor for the sin.
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