Pope Leo XIV received participants of the VIII Colloquium promoted by the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and the Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies of Jordan this Monday at the Apostolic Palace. The meeting, centered this year on the theme “Human Compassion and Empathy in Modern Times”, brought together Christian and Muslim representatives in a new gathering promoted by the Holy See as part of its interreligious dialogue agenda.
During his address, the Pontiff defended the need to strengthen cooperation between Christians and Muslims to promote peace, solidarity, and fraternity in a world marked by wars and indifference. Leo XIV stated that compassion and empathy are not secondary elements, but essential dimensions of both Christianity and Islam.
The speech comes just two days after the Pontiff addressed another message to Muslim leaders calling precisely for the rejection of the use of religion as justification for conflicts and confrontations.
Vatican Fraternity and Empathy
The words of Leo XIV reflect a clear continuity with the orientation developed by the Holy See since the Second Vatican Council and especially reinforced in recent pontificates. The current Pope once again presented interreligious dialogue as a necessary path to address contemporary challenges and called for transforming indifference into concrete solidarity.
In his address, he cited both the Gospel and Islamic references to underscore the importance of mercy and attention to the most vulnerable. He also praised Jordan’s role in welcoming refugees and highlighted the Hashemite kingdom as an example of coexistence in the Middle East.
The tone of the speech directly recalls many of Francisco’s interventions on Islam and universal fraternity. In Evangelii Gaudium, the Argentine pontiff stated that “authentic Islam and the correct interpretation of the Quran oppose every form of violence,” a formulation that marked much of the Vatican’s approach to the Muslim world in recent years.
The insistence on concepts such as fraternity, empathy, and collaboration between religions has become one of the pillars of contemporary Vatican diplomacy.
The Historical Vision of Saints and Doctors of the Church on Islam
However, the language currently employed from Rome contrasts notably with that used for centuries by numerous saints, martyrs, and doctors of the Church when referring to Islam and Muhammad.
St. John of Damascus, one of the great Eastern fathers of the eighth century and a deep connoisseur of the Islamic world, described Islam as a “heresy” and considered Muhammad a “false prophet.” In his work On Heresies, he stated that Islam acted as a “precursor of the Antichrist.”
St. Thomas Aquinas also addressed the Islamic question directly. The Angelic Doctor held that Muhammad had not confirmed his preaching through miracles or supernatural arguments, but “by the force of arms,” mixing —as he wrote— “fables and false doctrines.”
In medieval and modern Spain, marked by centuries of confrontation with Islam, numerous martyrs publicly rejected conversion to the Muslim faith. The Martyrs of Córdoba in the ninth century explicitly denounced the Islamic denial of the divinity of Christ and of the Most Holy Trinity.
Later, St. John of Ribera, Archbishop of Valencia, described Islam as a religious and social threat to Christendom. In his writings, he qualified the Mohammedan doctrine as an “invention of the devil” and denounced both its doctrinal errors and its political expansion.
St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori also harshly criticized the Islamic conception of paradise, which he considered reduced to purely sensual and material pleasures.
These references show how, for much of the history of the Church, Islam was viewed primarily from an apologetic and doctrinal perspective, very different from the language centered today on dialogue, fraternity, and interreligious cooperation.
Between Interreligious Diplomacy and Doctrinal Memory
The words of Leo XIV once again highlight the distance between this contemporary diplomatic language and the way in which much of the Catholic tradition historically addressed the Islamic question. For centuries, saints, martyrs, and doctors of the Church analyzed Islam mainly from the defense of the Christian faith and from the concrete experience of persecution, political expansion, or religious conflict.
In that contrast between the current insistence on empathy and universal fraternity, and the harshness with which much of the Catholic tradition historically judged Islam, lies one of the most sensitive issues of the interreligious dialogue promoted from Rome today.