Vatican City, Oct 29, 2025 / 05:00 am
Pope Leo XIV joined faith leaders on Tuesday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Church’s declaration on building relationships with non-Christian religions.
Approximately 300 representatives of world religions and cultures joined the Holy Father for an evening ecumenical prayer service for peace organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio and held at the Colosseum in Rome.
“Peace is a constant journey of reconciliation,” the Holy Father said at the Oct. 28 event.
Thanking religious leaders for coming together in Rome, he said their interfaith meeting expressed their shared “conviction that prayer is a powerful force for reconciliation.”
“This is our witness: offering the immense treasures of ancient spiritualities to contemporary humanity,” he said.
“We need a true and sound era of reconciliation that puts an end to the abuse of power, displays of force, and indifference to the rule of law,” he added. “Enough of war, with all the pain it causes through death, destruction, and exile!”
In his remarks, the pope urged people not to be indifferent to the “cry of the poor and the cry of the earth” in their pursuits for peace in countries scarred by ongoing conflict and injustice.
“In the power of prayer, with hands raised to heaven and open to others, we must ensure that this period of history, marked by war and the arrogance of power, soon comes to an end, giving rise to a new era,” he said.
“We cannot allow this period to continue. It shapes the minds of people who grow accustomed to war as a normal part of human history,” he continued.
Several people waved small blue banners with the word “peace” in different languages while Pope Leo and the other religious leaders lit candles to symbolize their shared prayer and renewed commitment to engage in interfaith dialogue.
After the prayer gathering at Rome’s iconic landmark, the Holy Father returned to the Vatican to join colorful celebrations jointly organized by the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity.
To mark the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, several multicultural music and dance performances were held inside the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall as well as a presentation highlighting papal initiatives to promote the Church’s dialogue with other religions since the pontificate of Pope Paul VI.
Pope Leo’s appearance and special address toward the end of the two-hour gathering highlighted the Church’s reverence for all people and its desire to collaborate with others for the common good.
“We belong to one human family, one in origin, and one also in our final goal,” he said. “Religions everywhere try to respond to the restlessness of the human heart.”
“Each in its own way offers teachings, ways of life, and sacred rites that help guide their followers to peace and meaning,” he said.
Emphasizing the common mission shared among people of different religions to “reawaken” the sense of the sacred in the world today, the Holy Father encouraged people to “keep love alive.”
“We have come together in this place bearing the great responsibility as religious leaders to bring hope to a humanity that is often tempted by despair,” Leo said.
“Let us remember that prayer has the power to transform our hearts, our words, our actions, and our world,” he said.
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CNA confuses the issue when it reports on this interreligious and intercultural gathering, but then breezily inserts the term “interfaith.”
The commonality is not “faith” (uniquely in the Triune One and the Self-disclosing person of Jesus Christ), but rather “belief” in, say, a Supreme Being of some sort, or more accurately, responsiveness to the inborn and universal Natural Law which makes us all members of one family.
A personal responsiveness which itself is muddled by different understandings…Islam, for example, which in the polyglot Qur’an strongly acknowledges the “Law of Moses” (the Ten Commandments), but then omit explicit mention of the six prohibitive Commandments. And, denies free will together with an embedded sin original to ourselves (the Original Sin) rather than to Islam’s totally distant, inscrutable, arbitrary and deterministic Allah. Whereas, equally radicalized factions in the secularist West often do not seem to remember any of the Natural Law at all. God, what God?
St. Irenaeus said it this way: “From the beginning, God had implanted in the heart of man the precepts of the natural law. Then he was content to remind him of them. This was the Decalogue [the Bible].” The Decalogue as distinguished from later Revelation, and as unpacked based on the incarnate LOGOS/Second Person of the Triune One. But as only partially retained—and then truncated and distorted—in the Qur’an, e.g., the “abrogation” (Islamic term) of spiritual or interior jihad with a quite different external jihad, now armed with oil money and modern weapons from the technocratic West.
The common denominator among religions is not faith, but the inborn and universal Natural Law, however understood or misunderstood (and for which even the Church “is neither the author nor the arbiter”—Veritatis Splendor, n. 95). The Natural Law (Islamic “fitrah”) offers a better start-point for accurate “dialogue” between the “witnesses to Christ” and “the followers of Islam.”
SUMMARY: The term “interfaith” is a fallacy, and not a synonym for the article’s interreligious or intercultural focus!
From personal experience in Africa as a lay Catholic seminary instructor in philosophy – who suffered a severe bout with malaria, and who was cared for at a Seventh Day Adventist field hospital, befriended by Anglican, Dutch Reformed clergy whose interfaith support in a then hostile environment, this event by appearance chaired by Leo XIV is a very good thing.
Differences evaporated, to assure the reader not our doctrinal differences, those attitudes, suspicion, dislike transformed into the living friendship of men who were ever ready to support eachother. Since it’s been my conviction that it’s camaraderie growing into brotherly love that will eventually unite us. That Christ will open a way for us.
Amen, Father Peter. Thank you & God bless you.
The World has a new weapon and that’s the cell phone. The cellphone is grouping people together with lies and truths. They believe the cell phone, because they think it tells the truth. Worst, Hamas is grouping together as many Muslims as they can, expect a lot of fires, they are setting them all over the world. “We are going to destroy everything.” It is interesting, they make friends with people then kill them secretly, they help people broke down on the streets, then kill them. Please look at this very carefully, they find lookalikes, and replace them in families, in politics, ETC. Please consider the worst is coming, their faith is increasing because they do not follow laws around the world.
Thankyou, Jesus helps us,
Prayer heals. Ecumenical prayer service for peace is a beautiful initiative.