Forty years after Pope John Paul II gathered religious leaders in Assisi to pray for peace, a senior Vatican cardinal says the day has become part of the Church's teaching. The Church already has a teaching on other religions, and it has not changed: Jesus Christ is the one Savior, and the Catholic Church is the one true faith.
Tuesday, Oct. 27, marks the 40th anniversary of the World Day of Prayer for Peace of 1986. The Community of Sant'Egidio opened its anniversary meeting, "Unarmed and Disarming Peace," on Sunday. It is expected to draw 384 representatives of religions, cultures and institutions from 53 countries, Vatican News reported.
Pope Leo XIV had planned to close the meeting. The Holy See Press Office said Friday he will not travel, "to aid his recovery following the thoracic surgery he underwent on Tuesday last week," and will send a message instead. At the Angelus on Sunday he asked the faithful to "join in spirit with the heads of churches and religious leaders who will gather in Assisi."
The anniversary comes with a claim. Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, told the Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome on Oct. 7 that Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas had settled the matter. "With these words, 27 October 1986 enters into the ordinary teaching of the Magisterium. It is no longer merely an event to remember: it is a criterion through which to interpret the present," Koovakad said, according to Advaticanum.
He also took aim at the day's critics. "Not everyone understood it. Integrist circles contested that day, even making it one of the reasons for a schismatic rupture; others feared syncretism or relativism, as they still do today," he said. He did not name Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, but InfoVaticana noted that the Society of St. Pius X counts Assisi among the signs that led its founder to consecrate four bishops without a papal mandate in 1988.
The words Koovakad pointed to are one sentence in Magnifica Humanitas, a social encyclical on artificial intelligence. Paragraph 223 says "those who use the name of God to legitimize terrorism, violence or war betray his true nature." It adds that the "spirit of Assisi" shows "believers can draw upon the most authentic sources of their particular spiritual traditions, where there is no room for 'sanctified hatred.'"
That is a sentence against violence in God's name. It names no date. It sets no rule for how Catholics pray beside other religions. It does not touch what the Church teaches about those religions.
That teaching is written down, and it is plain. "It is clear that it would be contrary to the faith to consider the Church as one way of salvation alongside those constituted by the other religions, seen as complementary to the Church or substantially equivalent to her," the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith taught in Dominus Iesus in 2000 (No. 21). John Paul II ratified and confirmed it.
The same declaration rules out "that mentality of indifferentism 'characterized by a religious relativism which leads to the belief that "one religion is as good as another."'" It says that while followers of other religions can receive grace, "objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation" (No. 22).
Dialogue does not make the religions equal. "Equality, which is a presupposition of inter-religious dialogue, refers to the equal personal dignity of the parties in dialogue, not to doctrinal content, nor even less to the position of Jesus Christ - who is God himself made man - in relation to the founders of the other religions," Dominus Iesus says (No. 22). Quoting Vatican II, it confesses: "We believe that this one true religion continues to exist in the Catholic and Apostolic Church" (No. 23).
The Catechism keeps the ancient formula, "Outside the Church there is no salvation," and explains that "all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body" (CCC 846).
Scripture leaves no room for a second road. "And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12, RSV-2CE). "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me" (Jn 14:6, RSV-2CE). The psalmist named the alternatives: "For all the gods of the peoples are idols" (Ps 96:5, RSV-2CE).
Pius XI saw the error coming. In Mortalium Animos in 1928, he warned of meetings to which "infidels of every kind" were invited, and said, "Certainly such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy" (No. 2).
John Paul II himself drew the line in Assisi. "The fact that we have come here does not imply any intention of seeking a religious consensus among ourselves or of negotiating our faith convictions," he told the religious leaders in the Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels. "Nor is it a concession to relativism in religious beliefs."
Benedict XVI repeated the warning on the 20th anniversary. "It is only right to avoid an inappropriate confusion," he wrote to the bishop of Assisi in a 2006 message. "The convergence of differences must not convey an impression of surrendering to that relativism which denies the meaning of truth itself and the possibility of attaining it."
The fear of relativism Koovakad brushed aside is the fear two popes put in writing. Critics have pointed for decades to what happened in town that day: Vaticanist Sandro Magister reported that Buddhists placed an image of the Buddha on the altar of Assisi's Church of St. Peter, InfoVaticana recalled.
This year's organizers have made the stakes clear. Sant'Egidio President Marco Impagliazzo said the world is "prey to nationalism and racism—a world that needs to be reunited once again." "If there is no spiritual unification of the world—and this is the message of Assisi and of all religions—it will be difficult for men and women to unite and to think of themselves as 'brothers and sisters to all,' as Pope Francis would say," he said at the meeting's presentation at the Vatican, according to Vatican News.
That is the globalist dream with incense. The Church has never sought the "spiritual unification of the world" by gathering every religion under one tent. She gathers the nations into one faith. Christ's command was not to dialogue with the nations but to teach them: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 28:19, RSV-2CE).
Christendom was built on that command. Missionaries did not ask the Franks, the English or the Poles to bring their gods to a common prayer. They brought them Christ, and whole peoples were baptized without ceasing to be peoples.
Christendom did more than baptize. When the East was overrun, the Church sanctioned its defense. In 1095 Urban II wrote that a "barbaric fury" had laid waste the churches of the Orient and the Holy City, and that at Clermont he had "solemnly enjoined" the princes "to free the churches of the East." The Catechism still teaches "just war": governments "cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed" (CCC 2308-2309). Assisi did not repeal that. Benedict XVI rejected a "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture" for the "hermeneutic of reform" — "renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church." Leo's line against "sanctified hatred" rewrites neither Dominus Iesus nor Urban. The teaching does not change.
Peace matters, and Catholics should pray for it on Tuesday and every day. But the peace of Christ comes through Christ. A young man looking for something worth his life will not find it in a faith that calls itself one tradition among many. He will find it in the Church that says what she has always said: Jesus Christ is Lord, and there is no other name.
