Sixty Years of Nostra Aetate:
A Ratzingerian Reading of Assisi Prevails over the Spirit of Abu Dhabi
Pope Leo's Vatican has released A Journey of Hope, a document celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council's declaration on the Church's relation to non-Christian religions. It is signed by three dicasteral prefects — Cardinal Fernández for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Koch for the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and Cardinal Koovakad for the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue — as well as by the secretaries of all three dicasteries (Archbishop Matteo, Archbishop Pace, and Msgr. Kankanamalage, respectively).
This alone is a fitting summary of the early Leonine pontificate. Pope Leo XIV has not moved rapidly to purge either the prefects inherited from Francis or the holdovers from the Benedict era. He has dicasteries collaborate rather than pursue unilateral efforts as Francis did, and documents are released that carry Cardinal Fernández's signature but read as though they could have been produced by Cardinal Müller — a dynamic similar to what was observed with Una Caro.
The short-form analysis of A Journey of Hope is that Cardinal Koch prevailed and Cardinal Fernández did not. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the Vatican has returned to Benedict's vision of interreligious dialogue, now expressed in Leo's characteristic style of striving simultaneously to be doctrinally clear and to avoid giving unnecessary offense. The document cites, for example, Pope Benedict's controversial Regensburg Address, yet does so without deploying it as a direct attack on Islam — which was the accusation leveled against the speech at the time.
The result is a text that at moments appears almost in tension with itself, yet clearly moves away from the tendencies toward religious indifferentism and syncretism that marked the previous pontificate. The importance of doctrinal clarity is in fact strongly affirmed:
"It must be free of ambiguity, avoiding relativism and syncretism, with the fullest possible affirmation of identity and the fullest possible commitment to dialogue."
The text also confirms expectations formed previously: Leo appears to regard the Second Vatican Council primarily as something that encouraged the Church to engage with the world as a source of peace and social stability and to pursue interreligious dialogue, but without altering doctrine. Vatican II reads, in this document, more as an addition to the tradition than as a revolutionary paradigm shift. Characteristically for Leo, while the post-World War II ideals of building peace and solidarity are kept alive, there is also an acknowledgment that prospects for unity and cooperation have to some extent deteriorated rather than improved, amid increasing violence and polarization.
The text likewise reveals that Pope Paul VI is a genuine source of inspiration for Pope Leo — consistently, however, in the sense of his promotion of the ideal of the civilization of love, rather than in regard to his handling of doctrine or the liturgy. Beyond this, there is a clear effort to rehabilitate the Assisi meeting of Pope John Paul II, an event that many younger Catholics regard as an embarrassing chapter in Church history.
References to Pope Francis appear, but as is customary under Leo, the sharper edges are removed. The heretical claim from Abu Dhabi — that God positively wills a diversity of religions — is nowhere to be found, while the Abu Dhabi event itself is mentioned only in passing. Furthermore, the limited references to religious freedom and dialogue with Muslims shift the focus toward the rights of Christians in Islamic countries, rather than treating religious freedom as an intrinsic right applicable even to false religions — a position consistent with prior statements by Pope Leo on the subject.
There are likewise no references to synodality or to the welcoming of migrants as a legal obligation. The document appears to have been published as a purely curial work with no connection whatsoever to the technically still-ongoing synodal process or any of its study groups.
Beyond these features, the note is largely composed of general statements about dialogue, the rejection of violence, and grassroots efforts. Nothing heretical and nothing upsetting — with the exception of its references to Islam and Judaism, of which the latter is the more notable.
The text employs the term "Islamophobia" once, without irony, yet in a definition so mild and unspecific as to carry little practical weight:
"43. Finally, it is worth noting the growing critical awareness of manifestations of Islamophobia, which fail to distinguish adequately between, on the one hand, cases of fundamentalism and violence and, on the other hand, the peaceful lives of other Muslim believers who integrate into and contribute to the countries that welcome them."
Since the text makes no attempt to argue that Islamic fundamentalism and violence are a modern phenomenon, contrary to the Quran, or a perversion of the religion — nor does it assert that integrating Muslims constitute a majority or even a significant minority — virtually any anti-Islamic politician could claim exemption from this definition of Islamophobia. Acknowledging that peaceable Muslims exist is all the standard requires.
The most consequential claims in the entire text concern modern Judaism. The first is a clear rejection of dual covenant theology — the position that Jews have no need of Christ or conversion to the Catholic faith for salvation. This view was promoted by Cardinal Walter Kasper, referenced in moderated form in Francis's Evangelii Gaudium, and occasionally advanced by certain Church figures even under Benedict XVI and John Paul II. It has now been explicitly repudiated:
"This does not mean, for Christians, that there are two paths to salvation, or that the covenant with the Jewish people runs parallel to the Christian way of salvation: the Church teaches that Christ is the one and only Redeemer."
The second noteworthy point is the document's acknowledgment that modern Judaism — Rabbinic Judaism — is a religion that developed after the destruction of the Second Temple, rather than a straightforward continuation of it. This runs contrary to the more classical philo-Semitic reading that portrays Rabbinic Judaism as the pure heir of biblical Israel and treats Christianity as the aberration. The historical orthodoxy today — that both early Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism can be understood as developments from Second Temple Judaism — is accepted in the text. At the same time, however, the document seems to imply that post-Second Temple Judaism somehow still confers on modern Jews a non-salvific covenant with God and a special relationship to the Old Testament that comes close to suggesting Rabbinic Judaism represents an older faith than Christianity.
This ambivalence captures the document as a whole: unwilling to endorse falsehood or heresy, moderately orthodox, more realistic in its ambitions than its predecessor documents, yet largely bland and designed to give no offense. The progressive carnival of the Francis era is truly over.
