Mutual Transformation by Patrick Carolan and Michael Centore

In 1960, Pope John XXIII met with the French Jewish historian and activist Jules Issac. Issac’s wife and daughter had been killed during the Holocaust, and after the war he devoted his life to developing a better understanding of Jewish-Christian relations. He researched and wrote about the Catholic roots of antisemitism and used his work to promote Jewish-Christian dialogue and reconciliation.

During their meeting, Isaac asked John XXIII whether he could “carry away a bit of hope.” The pope replied, “You have a right to more than hope!” It was a result of their encounter that John XXIII created the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, appointing Cardinal Augustin Bea as its first president. A few years later, Cardinal Bea was one of the most highly influential participants in the Second Vatican Council. He served as the key person in the drafting of Nostra Aetate, the Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions. Nostra Aetate was passed by a vote of 2,221 to 88 by the bishops at the Council. It was the first document in the church’s history to focus on the relationship between Catholics and non-Christians, particularly Jews and Muslims, and was promulgated by Pope Paul VI on October 28, 1965.

While Nostra Aetate is often considered to be revolutionary and transformational, it was far from the first attempt to bring about an improved understanding between faith traditions. History is filled with examples of religious leaders who have reached out to understand “the other” in order to promote unity for the common good and usher in an era of peace. Perhaps the most famous of these examples is the 13th-century encounter between Saint Francis of Assisi and the Egyptian Sultan al-Kamil. There is a lot of mythology and speculation around what the two discussed during their approximately three-week dialogue, as is often the case when the narrative of a particular event is written to convey a particular bias or perspective. As a child attending Catholic school, I (Patrick) was taught that Saint Francis set out to either become a martyr or convert the sultan to Christianity, and that in the end the sultan did indeed convert. In the Muslim world, the inverse was true: it was thought that Francis converted and became a Sufi. For a period after the encounter, Franciscans were even referred to as “Franciscan Sufis.”

What is known is that in addition to being the leader of the Muslim armies during the Fifth Crusade, the sultan was also a very spiritual person. He allowed Christians who lived in his territories to freely practice their faith. He would often invite mystics of all different faith traditions to stay at his palace. One of those was the Sufi mystic Shams-I Tabrīzī, who later became the mentor of the Sufi poet and teacher Rumi. It is said that Shams-I Tabrīzī was at the palace when the sultan and Saint Francis had their encounter. Saint Francis at the time had a reputation as a seeker. Twice before he sat out for Damietta in Egypt, he attempted to travel to lands controlled by Muslims. Both times, the first due to illness and the second to inclement weather, he failed to reach his destination. Interestingly, both of his attempts were to land rich in Sufism. It is said that when Francis first met the sultan, he greeted him with his familiar expression: “May the Lord give you peace.” The sultan was surprised because this was almost identical to the familiar Muslim greeting of peace, “Assalam o alaikum,” or “Peace be upon you.”

After their encounter, the Muslim armies under al-Kamil soundly defeated the Christian armies. They took thousands of crusaders as prisoners. It would have been the standard practice for the Christian soldiers to be massacred. Instead, the sultan ordered his troops to provide food and water to the prisoners and granted them safe passage. When Saint Francis returned home, he immediately amended the rules of the Franciscan order to reflect this benevolence on the part of the sultan. As Paul Moses explains in his book The Saint and the Sultan, “Francis advocated a revolutionary new way for his friars to interact with Muslims. Rather than preach at them, he said, they could just live peacefully among them and even ‘be subject’ to them. So here he is reaching out not just to the sultan but to Muslims in general.”

Both Saint Francis and the Sultan al-Kamil understood the importance of dialogue and relationship for achieving peace. They understood that while they may have worshiped differently, they were celebrating the same God. They could see God’s love in each other. A few years later, Saint Clare, the co-founder of the Franciscan order, said that if a person looks at you, they should see Christ, and if you look at a person, you should see Christ. Francis and the sultan each saw Christ in each other. They may have manifested that vision differently, but it was nonetheless a vision centered around love for the other, not hatred.

This process of mutual transformation between Francis and al-Kamil is worth reflecting on as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate. One need only scan the headlines to see that the focus of this document and the questions that it raises are still relevant today. Religion is being used for ulterior purposes, leading to war and violence. Conflicts in the Middle East have resulted in massacres of innocent children, both Jewish and Muslim. According to Pew Research, in 2018 more than a quarter of the world’s countries experienced hostilities motivated by religious hatred. Women have faced increasing harassment for violating religious codes.

We have seen the rise of Christian nationalism across the globe. In the US, the Republican Party won the most recent presidential election by running on a platform based on a document called Project 2025. The document was written by people closely associated with the Catholic organization Opus Dei. Among the positions the document calls for is to declare the United States a Christian nation and require teaching of the Christian Bible in all classrooms and Christian prayer in all schools. It also calls for banning and deporting “the other,” which would include Muslims and refugees. Opus Dei’s mission is to return the Catholic Church to a pre–Vatican II model. It preaches the supremacy of the Catholic Church, that it is only through the Catholic Church that can one reach salvation. In addition to Christian nationalism, there is a movement in the US towards Catholic integralism, a belief that the true worship of God is essential to the common good and can only be accomplished by when the political authority recognizes and promotes the one true religion, Catholicism.

Since the publication of Nostra Aetate, members of the Catholic Church hierarchy and Catholic organizations like Opus Dei have been trying to bury, diminish, and even repudiate it. For a while after the Second Vatican Council, there were lots of discussions, conferences, articles, and exchanges around the document. But that changed under the direction of John Paul II. In September 2000, the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith (CDF) issued a document titled Dominus Iesus. This document declared the official position of the Catholic Church as the one true church and condemned other views contrary to the Catholic faith. It was very controversial because it claimed that only the Catholic Church expresses the full truth of the church of Christ, and that other Christian churches are not as authentic. While it did not mention Nostra Aetate, it was clear that part of its purpose was to repudiate the Council’s overtures toward ecumenism.

Every 10 years or so, Nostra Aetate is pulled out and there are articles and conferences celebrating it, and then it is hidden away again and barely mentioned. To the best of our knowledge, it is not even a required component of the curriculum at Catholic seminaries. It is not taught as part of standard Catholic education nor preached from the pulpit on Sundays. But a document so profound and transformative should not be gathering dust. We should not be asking whether the questions Nostra Aetate raises are still relevant; we should be asking how we can reintroduce and reincorporate its teachings into the life of our faith.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim voices have all challenged us to do precisely this. Writing in the Catholic Herald in 2022, Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Romain observed: “Nostra Aetate—the document that radically revised the Church’s relationship with Judaism—is rather like the United Nations. A wonderful ideal which has led to enormous achievements, yet which still has not reached its full potential.” At a colloquium on Living the Christian Faith in an Inter-Religious and Multicultural World in 2019, Archbishop Felix Machado said, “Without wanting to oversimplify, I would state that interreligious dialogue means making every effort to relate to people across religious boundaries in order to collaborate and promote peace in society and the world.” When Machado was serving as the Under-Secretary of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in 2008, he wrote: “All men form but one community. What is this unity? We need to have a clear idea of ‘being together’ or ‘living together’ in mutual respect, harmony, and peace.” And Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University, expressed a similar sentiment at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate: “There is a great battle going on in the world between dark and light, and on almost every issue we are on the same page. It’s time for us to understand that we are in the same boat and that we can cooperate.”

Perhaps the issue all along is that we have been looking at Nostra Aetate from a theological perspective when we should instead be seeking to understand it as a prophetic call for unity, peace, and oneness. The 20th-century Catholic priest and mystic Thomas Berry warned us that “we will go into the future as a single sacred community or we will all perish in the desert.” Berry was not talking about how we practice our faith—what prayers we pray, whether we worship on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. He was talking about how we see ourselves in connection to God and all of God’s wondrous creation.

In the Christian world, the prayer most frequently prayed is the Lord’s Prayer or “Our Father.” It is the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray. Its central petition is: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It is hard to imagine that in heaven there will be wars over how to worship God, or that some children will be starving while others live in mansions. We should use this 60th anniversary of Nostra Aetate to reimagine it not as a theological construct but as a prophetic call to come together in unity and peace and begin to create God’s kingdom of heaven here on earth. ♦

Patrick Carolan is a Catholic activist, organizer, and writer. He served as the Executive director of the Franciscan Action Network for ten years; he co-founded the Global Catholic Climate Movement and Catholics Vote Common Good. His writing and activism are centered on his understanding and belief through Franciscan spirituality of the connectedness of all creation and God.

Michael Centore is the editor of Today’s American Catholic.

Image: Fra Angelico, Francis of Assisi before the Sultan Al-Kamil Muhammad Al-Malik, 1429