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Dialogue and Proclamation, Not Dialogue or Proclamation

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Dialogue and Proclamation, Not Dialogue or Proclamation

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A Church that believes it holds the fullness of revealed truth and a Church that genuinely listens to other religions can sound, from outside, like two different institutions pulling in opposite directions. The Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue has spent six decades arguing they are not. Its own account of its mission, drawn from the 1984 document Dialogue and Mission, describes dialogue itself as a manner of acting, an attitude and a spirit that guides conduct, implying concern, respect and hospitality toward the other, language closer to a description of a disposition than of a diplomatic strategy. The office's consistent position, restated across the documents it has issued since, is that dialogue and Christian proclamation are complementary goals of the Church's mission rather than competing ones: engaging another tradition on its own terms is not treated as a step away from evangelization but as one of the forms evangelization can honestly take.

That is a narrower claim than it can sound. The Dicastery does not present dialogue as a substitute for Catholic teaching, nor as evidence that all religions are interchangeable paths to the same end; it presents dialogue as compatible with holding, and continuing to proclaim, a specific faith. Whether that balance persuades is a live question among the Church's own dialogue partners. That the Vatican has maintained a standing office for it, continuously, since a year before Nostra Aetate itself was promulgated, is not.

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Our History, Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue
Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, Holy See, 2026View the Source
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