Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue

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

Pope Paul VI created the office now called the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue before the Second Vatican Council had even decided what it would say about other religions. He established the Secretariat for Non-Christians in 1964, while the Council was still in session, a year ahead of the Council's own declaration Nostra Aetate, which would go on to reset Catholic teaching about Judaism and Islam. The Secretariat existed, in other words, before the theology it would spend the following decades implementing had been finished being written. In 1974 it grew a dedicated Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims, giving the Church's largest single interreligious relationship its own standing structure inside the office.

The name changed twice more as the Church's sense of the office's standing changed with it. In 1988, John Paul II's reorganization of the Roman Curia, the apostolic constitution Pastor Bonus, renamed it the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, replacing a name defined by what the world's religions were not, non-Christian, with one defined by what the office actually did. It carried that name for over three decades until Pope Francis's 2022 curial reform, Praedicate Evangelium, renamed it once more, to the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, the name it holds today.

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.