Sixty years after Nostra aetate, the Vatican is calling for a further “shift in mindset” and a “new ethic of dialogue”. The Council certainly commended dialogue and collaboration with non-Christians, but it did so while insisting upon Christian witness and the proclamation of Christ. Six decades later, encounter itself may be described as a “theological locus” in which the Holy Ghost is to be heard. The distinction matters. Catholics can and should cooperate with people of every religion for justice, peace and the common good. But another religion is not thereby a theological partner. What began as a means of encounter increasingly appears to have become a theological principle.
There is a simple Catholic distinction which might have spared the Church sixty years of confusion: truth must be confessed; persons must be loved. Nothing in that proposition requires hostility towards a Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Protestant or unbeliever. On the contrary, it explains why Catholics may cooperate generously with any of them without pretending that religious differences do not matter. Love of neighbour concerns the man before us; theological judgement concerns whether what he believes about God is true. Confuse those things and charity towards persons gradually becomes affirmation of religions. That is the difficulty raised afresh by the Vatican’s new Note for the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra aetate, which calls for a further “shift in mindset”, proposes a “new ethic of dialogue” and, most consequentially, presents interreligious encounter as potentially “a theological locus where the Holy Spirit wishes to be heard through the encounter with the other”.¹
A distinction must be established immediately. Nostra aetate concerns relations with non-Christian religions; ecumenism properly concerns separated Christians and was treated principally by Vatican II in Unitatis redintegratio. A baptised Protestant, an Orthodox Christian, a Muslim, a Hindu and an atheist do not stand in the same theological relationship to the Catholic Church. To collapse those distinctions into the capacious modern category of “dialogue” already obscures questions of Baptism, revelation, ecclesial communion and salvation. The new Note nevertheless contains qualifications which must be acknowledged. It rejects relativism and syncretism, does not formally teach that every religion is equally true, invokes Jesus Christ as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, and maintains that dialogue belongs within the Church’s evangelising mission. It also rejects the construction of a single world religion in which beliefs are flattened into an artificial synthesis.² Nuntiatoria has no interest in inventing a heresy where a document expressly denies one. The question is more serious: whether orthodox propositions remain the governing principles of the theological architecture in which they have been placed.
Nor would it be accurate to say that the language of dialogue was simply invented after the Council and falsely attributed to Nostra aetate. The declaration itself explicitly exhorts Catholics to engage in “dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions”. Any serious criticism must begin there. But the complete sentence matters. Such engagement is to be undertaken “with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life”. Immediately before that exhortation the Council declares that the Church “ever must proclaim Christ ‘the way, the truth, and the life’”, in whom men find the fullness of religious life.³ The conciliar order is therefore not difficult to discern. Whatever is true and holy among other peoples is to be recognised; non-Christians are to be treated with prudence and charity; legitimate collaboration is encouraged; but the Catholic enters that encounter as a witness to the Faith and the Church continues to proclaim Jesus Christ.
The treatment of Islam makes the distinction clearer still. Nostra aetate urges Christians and Muslims to pursue mutual understanding and then specifies practical objects of cooperation: they should “preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom”.⁴ This is remarkably close to the distinction Catholic theology requires. Catholics and Muslims need not pretend that Christianity and Islam are mutually enriching theological systems in order to defend families from violence, alleviate poverty, oppose injustice or preserve civil peace. Such cooperation belongs principally to the temporal common good. It is possible precisely because natural reason remains common to men who disagree about supernatural revelation.
Nostra aetate does recommend “biblical and theological studies” and “fraternal dialogues” in its treatment of Judaism, but the context is unique and cannot simply be universalised into a doctrine of religions as theological partners. Christianity receives the Old Testament through Israel; Our Lord according to the flesh is Jewish; the Apostles were Jews; and St Paul supplies an explicitly theological account of Israel’s relationship to the mystery of salvation. The Council itself establishes that unique relationship before recommending theological study.⁵ Nothing comparable licenses the conclusion that Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism or the religions of mankind constitute theological sources from which the Church completes her understanding of revelation.
Indeed, the declaration ends its treatment of the Jewish question by returning explicitly to mission and salvation. Christ, it says, underwent His Passion so that all might attain salvation, and therefore “it is the burden of the Church’s preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God’s all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows”.⁶ Whatever legitimate questions may be raised about Nostra aetate itself, the declaration does not present permanent religious plurality as the desired terminus of the Church’s mission.
That makes the contrast with the 2026 anniversary Note especially instructive. In 1965 dialogue and collaboration were commended “in witness to the Christian faith and life”. In 2026 interreligious encounter may itself become “a theological locus where the Holy Spirit wishes to be heard through the encounter with the other”. These propositions need not be construed as formally contradictory, but neither are they saying the same thing. The first principally describes what the Catholic brings to the encounter: witness to revealed truth. The second introduces the possibility of what the Church may receive theologically through the encounter. A pastoral method has acquired a theological function.
This is where the familiar expression “the spirit of Vatican II” is both tempting and inadequate. It is tempting because the later programme plainly exceeds the words of the original declaration. Yet it is inadequate because the development did not simply materialise from nowhere under cover of an imaginary Council. The conciliar text supplied a foothold: dialogue, collaboration, recognition of truth and holiness outside the visible boundaries of the Church. What followed was a hermeneutic of implementation. A limited pastoral principle generated a practice; the practice expanded; the expanded practice generated a theology; and the later theology increasingly read its own development back into the conciliar starting point as though the whole subsequent programme had been present there from the beginning.
This mechanism is familiar from Nuntiatoria’s wider examination of the post-conciliar revolution. Implementation need not proceed by formally repudiating the original text. It can operate by changing emphasis, hierarchy and finality. A qualification remains printed on the page while another principle becomes dominant in practice. Christ remains mentioned, but fraternity becomes the practical horizon; evangelisation remains affirmed, but dialogue becomes the characteristic activity; conversion remains theoretically desirable, but “proselytism” acquires a pejorative resonance; the Kingship of Christ survives as doctrine while permanent religious plurality increasingly supplies the architecture within which the Church imagines her public mission. Our recent examination of Magnifica Humanitas reached precisely this point: human dignity, fraternity, justice and peace are genuine Catholic goods, but they must remain ordered beneath God’s glory, Christ’s Kingship, sin, grace, redemption, worship and man’s supernatural end. Otherwise orthodox vocabulary itself can be absorbed into an essentially humanitarian theological structure.⁷
The distinction between the neighbour and his religion therefore becomes decisive. Catholics may and should cooperate with people of other religions for the common good. A Catholic may stand beside a Muslim in defending an unborn child, beside a Jew in opposing antisemitism, beside a Protestant in feeding the homeless and beside an atheist in defending freedom of speech. He may defend a mosque against an arsonist because justice requires it, protect a Muslim family from persecution because they are his neighbours, or work with people of no religion to protect children, alleviate poverty and preserve civil peace. None of this is indifferentism. It is justice and charity. Men who disagree profoundly about revelation can nevertheless recognise goods accessible to natural reason. Peace, honesty, protection of innocent life, care for the poor, defence of the vulnerable and civil concord do not require theological agreement before Christians and non-Christians can pursue them together.
But theology is another matter. Once the conversation moves from the temporal common good to God, revelation and salvation, the Catholic cannot approach the encounter as though Christianity and another religion were complementary participants in an exploration whose destination remains undiscovered. Catholicism makes a claim which either governs that encounter or is quietly suspended during it: God has spoken definitively in Jesus Christ. The Church possesses a deposit of faith which she did not manufacture and cannot negotiate. Christ did not establish His Church so that, after Pentecost, she might discover through dialogue with other religions what God had omitted to reveal. Revelation is received from Christ, entrusted to the Apostles, preached to the nations and accepted through faith and Baptism. Dominus Iesus insisted upon precisely this “definitive and complete character” of the revelation of Jesus Christ against theories according to which Christian revelation should somehow be regarded as incomplete and complemented by the religious experience of mankind.⁸
That is why the new Note’s description of interreligious encounter as potentially “a theological locus where the Holy Spirit wishes to be heard through the encounter with the other” crosses an important conceptual threshold. Certainly the Holy Ghost is not imprisoned within our expectations. A Muslim may expose a Catholic’s ignorance of Islam; a Jew may correct a Christian’s misunderstanding of Judaism; a Hindu may display a natural virtue which puts a Catholic to shame; a pagan philosopher may reason correctly from creation to truths accessible to natural reason. St Thomas did not imagine that truth became false because Aristotle had written it. But none of this makes another religion a theological source for the Catholic Faith. The Holy Ghost may use another human being providentially without authenticating that man’s religion. Truth found anywhere remains truth because all truth ultimately comes from God, but supernatural revelation is not assembled from the religious experience of mankind. It has been given in Christ and entrusted to His Church.
The same conceptual movement is already visible in contemporary ecumenism. The recently examined Charta Œcumenica does not confine itself to Christians cooperating in charitable work or defending the common good. It commits participating churches to listen to the Holy Spirit and “share spiritual gifts”, to “discern together the Word of God”, to learn to appreciate the worship and spiritual life of other communions, to gather together in prayer, to continue moving towards Eucharistic hospitality, and to cooperate in Christian and theological education.⁹ The progression matters because cooperation has become dialogue, dialogue spiritual exchange, spiritual exchange common discernment, common discernment common prayer, and common prayer tends towards sacramental hospitality. The neighbour has become a theological partner. Now the same conceptual movement appears in the interreligious sphere, where encounter with adherents of religions which deny central truths of Christianity can itself be described as a place in which the Holy Ghost is heard theologically.
Religious conversation certainly has a legitimate purpose. Catholics ought to understand what other people actually believe rather than attack caricatures. Misunderstandings may be corrected, objections answered, prejudices removed, natural truths recognised, and friendship may prepare a man to listen where hostility would have closed his ears. Yet Catholic charity gives such conversation an ultimate direction. If Jesus Christ is truly God incarnate, if He died for this man’s redemption, established His Church, instituted Baptism and commanded the Gospel to be preached to every creature, the Christian cannot regard his neighbour’s permanent continuation in religious error as a satisfactory spiritual outcome. He desires his conversion. That is neither conquest nor coercion. It is the logical consequence of believing Christianity to be true and loving another human being enough to desire that he possess the greatest good one possesses oneself.
The distinction between conversion and coercion is therefore indispensable. Faith cannot be forced. A conversion manufactured by intimidation, deception or material inducement would contradict the nature of Christian faith itself. But rejecting coercion does not require rejecting conversion as the object of mission. The Church has no mandate to compel belief, but she certainly possesses a mandate to preach it. This is why the modern treatment of “proselytism” requires such care. If the word denotes dishonest recruitment or coercive pressure, Catholics have nothing invested in defending it. But when proselytism is rhetorically placed beside defensiveness, hostility and conquest while dialogue becomes the enlightened alternative, the desire for conversion itself can begin almost imperceptibly to acquire the odour of something embarrassing. The result is a remarkable inversion: desiring that a Muslim become Catholic can appear less charitable than desiring that he remain indefinitely Muslim.
The danger is no longer theoretical because the theology of dialogue has already produced a liturgical and symbolic culture in which the distinction between respect for persons and validation of religions becomes difficult for ordinary Catholics to perceive. Interreligious worship illustrates the point. There is a world of difference between Catholics and non-Christians cooperating to feed the hungry and Catholics presenting themselves alongside representatives of contradictory religions precisely as religious believers engaged in acts of worship. The first concerns a common temporal good; the second necessarily says something about religion itself. John Paul II understood the danger when preparing the Assisi gathering of 1986, carefully distinguishing gathering together for prayer from performing a single common interreligious prayer. Benedict XVI later returned to Assisi while explicitly warning that such encounters must not give rise to religious relativism.¹⁰ Those precautions were necessary because public religious acts teach. Gesture is not theologically neutral. The ordinary observer presented with representatives of contradictory religions gathered under Catholic auspices does not naturally reconstruct the scholastic qualifications supplied afterwards; he sees religions standing alongside one another as religions, each publicly addressing the transcendent according to its own tradition, within an ensemble validated by ecclesiastical authority.
Indifferentism seldom needs to arrive in the form of a proposition declaring all religions equally true. It can advance more effectively through habituation. What once appeared religiously incongruous becomes familiar; what becomes familiar ceases to disturb; what ceases to disturb acquires implicit legitimacy; eventually theological vocabulary catches up with ecclesial practice. The trajectory reached an extraordinary point at Abu Dhabi on 4 February 2019, when Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. Its published text declared that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions, colour, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom”.¹¹ The construction was remarkable because sex and race belong to the created natural order, whereas religious error does not. God positively wills created goods; He cannot positively will falsehood as falsehood because He cannot contradict the truth He has revealed.
The distinction missing from that signed formulation was subsequently forced into the open after Bishop ✠Athanasius Schneider raised the matter directly with Francis. Schneider reported that, during their ad limina encounter on 1 March 2019, he asked Francis to clarify the Abu Dhabi sentence because the diversity of religions could not be understood as positively willed by God in the same sense as the diversity of the sexes. According to Schneider’s published account, Francis acknowledged that the sentence should be understood according to God’s permissive will and permitted Schneider to make that clarification public.¹² Francis then employed the same Scholastic category publicly at his General Audience of 3 April, asking why God permits many religions and referring expressly to the voluntas permissiva of God. The Vatican’s official English rendering has Francis saying that God “wanted to allow this”, but the operative theological category is permission, not positive willing.¹³
That distinction must not be blurred. To say that God permits religious error is not to say that He desires religious error. Divine permission means that within His Providence God does not prevent an evil, deficiency or disorder from occurring; it does not transform what is permitted into something positively willed as good. Evil itself is not some rival positive substance created alongside goodness. It involves the absence, corruption or deliberate contradiction of a good which ought to be present. God may permit such evil without willing it as evil, just as He can permit the misuse of creaturely freedom while remaining wholly good. Religious error belongs within the same necessary distinction. Whatever truths, natural goods or genuine virtues may remain within a false religious system derive ultimately from God; its errors do not thereby acquire divine authorship.
This makes the Abu Dhabi formulation more problematic, not less. Race, sex and language can properly be spoken of as features of the created order positively willed by God. Mutually contradictory religious propositions cannot. Christianity confesses that Jesus Christ is God incarnate; Islam denies it. Christianity confesses the Trinity; Islam rejects it. God cannot positively will both a revealed truth and the deliberate contradiction of that truth. He may permit men to reject what He has revealed, just as He permits other consequences of creaturely freedom, but permission cannot be converted into approbation. The existence of religious error beneath Providence no more makes religious error a divinely intended good than the existence of moral evil beneath Providence makes moral evil part of God’s desired order.
Nor does divine permission transform what is permitted into an ideal to be preserved. The Church evangelises unbelief which Providence permits, teaches against heresy which Providence permits, seeks Christian unity despite divisions which Providence permits, and baptises converts although Providence permits men to remain outside the Church. To move from the proposition that God permits religious plurality to the proposition that religious plurality should constitute the permanent spiritual architecture of human fraternity is therefore not a legitimate deduction from Providence. Permission explains how error can exist beneath God’s sovereignty; it does not turn error into a theological good.
The chronology matters. The clarification was not contained in the Abu Dhabi declaration itself. It became necessary when the theological problem in its wording was challenged. This is precisely the pattern which now deserves scrutiny in the wider theology of dialogue: formulations are issued which appear to exceed traditional Catholic categories, qualifications are subsequently supplied to reconcile them with those categories, and the practical programme which generated the problematic formulation continues largely undisturbed. The qualification protects orthodoxy at the level of explanation while the original conceptual movement remains in place.
The institutional and architectural symbolism which followed Abu Dhabi only made the difficulty harder to ignore. The Human Fraternity project presented different religions as partners in constructing a common religiously informed fraternity. Again, the qualifications are readily available: coexistence is not equivalence, neighbourliness is not syncretism, separate places of worship are not a single religion. Each proposition can be defended. Yet Catholic theology must also ask what the ensemble teaches. The same question now arises from the anniversary Note. Dialogue does not mean relativism; interreligious prayer does not mean syncretism; religious plurality is permitted rather than positively willed; the Holy Ghost may act through an individual adherent without authenticating his religion; dialogue may be called a theological locus without another religion becoming a source of revelation. Taken separately, qualifications can be constructed which preserve an orthodox proposition. After sixty years, however, the Catholic is entitled to ask why the characteristic practices and formulas of the system require so many qualifications to prevent them from appearing to say what Catholicism cannot say.
Nor is concern about practical religious indifferentism confined to traditionalist criticism. Material already examined by Nuntiatoria recorded an acknowledgement of an “ecclesiological pluralism” in which Christian churches and communities can effectively come to be treated as equivalent, together with a “religious pluralism” according to which religions become equivalent ways to God. Significantly, that same analysis pointed to Dominus Iesus as a Roman attempt to resist precisely these tendencies.¹⁴ Rome therefore recognised the problem a quarter of a century ago. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith insisted upon the definitive character of revelation in Jesus Christ, distinguished theological faith from belief in other religions, and reaffirmed the unicity and salvific universality of Christ and His Church. The question in 2026 is not whether those propositions can still be found somewhere in the documentary record. It is whether ecclesiastical practice and rhetoric continue consistently to proceed from them.
Here Quas primas supplies the indispensable Catholic horizon. Pius XI did not locate the world’s hope in an indefinite fraternity among religions. He located it in the Kingship of Jesus Christ. “Men must look for the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ.” Christ possesses sovereignty not merely over private Christian devotion but over persons, families, societies and nations. Nuntiatoria has returned repeatedly to this point because it supplies the answer to the anthropological and humanitarian drift of modern ecclesiastical discourse: the final question is not whether humanity can construct a humane order, but whether the human order acknowledges the sovereignty of Christ.¹⁵ Three years later, in Mortalium animos, Pius XI could acknowledge the understandable desire for fraternity among peoples and cooperation for peace while rejecting the transfer of that principle into religion in such a way that revealed differences ceased to be treated principally as questions of truth.¹⁶
That distinction remains sufficient. Social cooperation does not require theological reciprocity; neighbourliness does not require spiritual exchange; charity does not require another religion to become a theological partner; peace does not require common worship; and loving a man does not require loving his error. The same principle applies, with the necessary ecclesiological distinctions, to separated Christians. Cooperation with Anglicans, Protestants and Orthodox Christians for legitimate temporal goods is one thing. Theological discussion directed towards removing obstacles to Catholic unity has an intelligible purpose. But ecumenism cannot become an alternative conception of unity in which permanent denominational plurality is celebrated as though Christ founded several communions possessing mutually corrective versions of Christianity.
The destination determines the nature of the dialogue. Conversation directed towards truth is intelligible; conversation which removes misconceptions can serve charity; conversation which prepares a man to hear the Gospel can serve evangelisation; theological discussion with separated Christians directed towards genuine unity in revealed truth possesses a recognisable object. But dialogue whose object is simply more dialogue has ceased to be a means and has become an ecclesiology. That is what makes the Vatican’s proposed “new ethic of dialogue” so consequential. An ethic identifies goods towards which human action should be directed. If dialogue itself becomes such a good, preserving the relationship can gradually become more important than resolving the religious disagreement.
There is a revealing paradox here. Successful evangelisation necessarily terminates an interreligious dialogue precisely as an interreligious dialogue. The Muslim who becomes Catholic is no longer a Muslim interlocutor; the atheist who receives Baptism is no longer an atheist dialogue partner; the Protestant reconciled to Catholic communion no longer represents a separated ecclesial community. If preserving religious diversity becomes necessary to preserving dialogue, mission and dialogue have acquired different final causes. At that point the Church does not need a “new ethic” to reconcile them. She needs to recover the old one. Charity feeds the hungry without asking for his baptismal certificate, protects the persecuted Muslim without pretending Islam is true, defends the Jew against antisemitism without denying the Gospel, works beside the Protestant for justice without pretending the Reformation did not divide Christendom, respects conscience because faith cannot be coerced, and listens because truth has nothing to fear from an honest question. But charity also evangelises, because temporal safety, social harmony and material wellbeing cannot exhaust what a Christian desires for another human soul.
This is the inversion which sixty years of dialogue have made increasingly possible: the desire for conversion can appear aggressive while the desire that one’s neighbour remain indefinitely within religious error appears charitable. Catholic charity says otherwise. Truth must be confessed and persons must be loved. Love the man enough to defend his dignity, protect his freedom, seek the common good with him, listen seriously to what he believes and never compel his conscience; but do not mistake respect for the man for reverence towards his error. If Jesus Christ is God, withholding Christ cannot become the supreme expression of respect for one’s neighbour.
The Church was not sent into the world to complete her revelation through encounter with the religions of mankind. She was sent because Revelation had already come. The Word had been made flesh; the Apostles had received their commission; the nations were to be taught and baptised. Dialogue may sometimes assist that mission, just as friendship, scholarship, diplomacy and works of charity may assist it. None of them supplies its final horizon. That horizon was given before Nostra aetate, before Assisi, before Abu Dhabi and before any “new ethic of dialogue”. It remains what it was when the Apostles went out into a pagan world which possessed more religious diversity than ours: not the indefinite preservation of religious plurality, but the conversion and sanctification of souls under the universal Kingship of Jesus Christ.
¹ Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, A Journey of Hope: Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate, 16 September 2026
² Ibid.
³ Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, §2, 28 October 1965
⁴ Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, §3
⁵ Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, §4
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Nuntiatoria/project analysis of Magnifica Humanitas, especially the relationship between human dignity, fraternity, Christ’s Kingship, redemption and man’s supernatural end.
⁸ Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, 6 August 2000
⁹ Charta Œcumenica, commitments concerning the Holy Spirit, shared spiritual gifts, common discernment, prayer, theological education and Eucharistic hospitality.
¹⁰ John Paul II, Address at the Conclusion of the World Day of Prayer for Peace, Assisi, 27 October 1986; Benedict XVI, Letter on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Interreligious Meeting of Prayer for Peace, 2 September 2006
¹¹ Francis and Ahmad al-Tayyeb, Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, Abu Dhabi, 4 February 2019
¹² Bishop ✠Athanasius Schneider, public account of his ad limina meeting with Pope Francis on 1 March 2019 concerning the Abu Dhabi formulation and the distinction between God’s positive and permissive will.
¹³ Francis, General Audience, 3 April 2019
¹⁴ Project material recording criticism of contemporary ecclesiological and religious pluralism and identifying Dominus Iesus as an attempt to correct such interpretations.
¹⁵ Pius XI, Quas primas, 11 December 1925; Nuntiatoria/project treatment of the Social Kingship of Christ.
¹⁶ Pius XI, Mortalium animos, 6 January 1928
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