The note with which three dicasteries celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra aetate cites Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensburg. It does so only once, in paragraph 24, without writing the name Regensburg and without reproducing the sentence that in 2006 provoked an international crisis with the Islamic world. The reference appears in the critical apparatus, under the official title of the event: “Address on the occasion of the meeting with representatives of the world of science (12 September 2006)”.
The text of paragraph 24 states, in the Spanish version published by the Holy See, that “perseverance in interreligious dialogue is meant to demonstrate that fundamentalism is a falsification of religions, contrary to their deepest vocation,” and adds: “In a well-known address, quoting the words of a Byzantine emperor, he stated that ‘the spread of faith by violence is something irrational. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul’”.
Regensburg without naming Regensburg
The sentence exists and is Benedict XVI’s. In the Regensburg lecture of 12 September 2006 it is the conclusion the Pope draws from the reasoning of Manuel II Palaeologus after having quoted him. What the note does not include is what came before in that text: the harsh medieval quotation about Muhammad and violence on which the international controversy of 2006 focused.
The operation is, in documentary terms, straightforward. From that speech the note takes the single sentence that no interlocutor can reject—that violence is contrary to the nature of God—and uses it to argue that fundamentalism betrays religions. It is exactly the argument Benedict XVI maintained. But it arrives stripped of the context that made it famous and without the name that identifies it.
Citing a speech by its official title is not to conceal it: it is the ordinary practice of Vatican documents, which refer to the Insegnamenti with the formal reference and the date. The point is different. A sixty-paragraph text on interreligious dialogue, approved by Leo XIV on 22 June and published on 16 September—four days after the twentieth anniversary of Regensburg—incorporates that speech into its chain of authorities without mentioning the controversy, without explaining it, and without taking a position on it.
A note signed by three dicasteries and approved by Leo XIV
The note is signed by Cardinals Víctor Manuel Fernández, Kurt Koch and George Jacob Koovakad, prefects of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity and the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, together with their three secretaries: Armando Matteo, Flavio Pace and Indunil Janakaratne Kodithuwakku Kankanamalage. Below appears the formula “Ex Audientia, 22 June 2026” and the Pope’s signature.
The citation is of interest because Regensburg is not a peaceful text even within the Church itself. At the end of August, the German Jesuit and Islamologist Felix Körner described that intervention as an “objective error” and maintained that Benedict XVI had then presented Christianity as the religion of rationality in contrast to an Islam portrayed differently. That a document signed by three dicasteries and approved by the Pope should resort to that speech to ground the critique of fundamentalism is, at the very least, an implicit stance on its continuing relevance.
Read also: A Jesuit describes Benedict XVI’s historic Regensburg speech as an “objective error”
The two citations of Benedict XVI
Paragraph 24 cites Benedict XVI twice. The first is from the message for the twentieth anniversary of the Assisi meeting, also from 2006: “we cannot invoke God as the Father of all if we refuse to behave as brothers toward some men created in the image of God.” The second is the one from Regensburg. Both follow one another and both serve the same purpose: to maintain that faith in God imposes universal fraternity and excludes religious violence.
The Holy See released, on the occasion of the note’s publication, interviews with the three prefects who sign it, but the published material contains no specific explanation regarding the presence of the reference to Regensburg or the criterion by which that passage was chosen. The U.S. portal Crux noted the citation on the same day, 16 September.
Read also: Selective memory: what the new Vatican note cites and what it leaves out