John Paul II’s historic gathering remains a powerful lesson in faith, religious differences and peace
Forty years ago, an extraordinary photograph was taken in the Italian town of Assisi. At its centre stands Pope John Paul II, surrounded by religious leaders from around the world: the Archbishop of Canterbury, representatives of Eastern Christianity, the Dalai Lama and many others. They came from different traditions, some with very different understandings of God and the world. Yet there they stood, together.
On October 27, 1986, Pope John Paul II had invited representatives of the world’s religions to pray for peace. They did not recite one common prayer; each tradition prayed in its own way. It was an unusual yet bold gesture against the backdrop of the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear destruction hanging over humanity.
All the groups in the early afternoon walked in procession, but like little streams flowing into a river”
The Pope chose Assisi because of St Francis, whose name and example had become synonymous with peace. Centuries earlier, during the Fifth Crusade, St Francis had crossed enemy lines to meet the Muslim Sultan al-Kamil. The gathering also drew upon the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate, which said the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy” in other religions, while proclaiming Christ, in whom she finds the fullness of religious life.
Among those present was a young Irish priest, Brendan Leahy, now Bishop of Limerick. He had helped with preparations and was assigned to accompany the Sikh delegation, about whose traditions, he readily admitted, he knew little.
“It was a very, very moving event,” he told The Irish Catholic. “We had all the different religious groupings. They first of all met in the morning and did their own rituals in different parts of the town. And then all the groups in the early afternoon walked in procession, but like little streams flowing into a river.”
It was bitterly cold, Bishop Leahy recalled, and dark with clouds. Then, as doves were released near the end, the weather changed. “At that very moment clouds opened up and we were really enveloped [in] this wonderful sunshine, a warming sunshine,” he said. To him, it seemed a little sign that God was pleased with the initiative.
A question of truth
Yet Bishop Leahy also remembered that “not everybody agreed that this was maybe such a great idea”. Among those who stayed away was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Cardinal Ratzinger’s main concern was not that peace mattered too little, but that religious truth could be made to matter too little. The gathering could suggest that religions were interchangeable, as though their contradictory claims about God were minor details beside a common sentiment.
John Paul II had anticipated this danger. For him, Assisi was not intended to negotiate religious convictions, nor was it “a concession to relativism in religious beliefs”. At the conclusion, speaking openly as a Christian, he declared: “peace bears the name of Jesus Christ”.
Nor was Cardinal Ratzinger’s objection an outright rejection of the Pope’s intentions. Addressing Chilean bishops in 1988, he defended Assisi, as John Paul II had intended it, against accusations of relativism. Yet he also warned against treating different religions as merely symbols of some ultimately unknowable reality. The question of truth could not simply be set aside.
Sixteen years later, Cardinal Ratzinger made the journey to Assisi himself, joining John Paul II in 2002 following the September 11 attacks.
Prayer was not merely something added to a peace campaign, but something reaching into the very convictions by which people lived”
Travelling by train alongside representatives of different religions, he saw something of humanity’s common pilgrimage towards peace. Writing afterwards, Cardinal Ratzinger insisted this was no declaration that all religions were equal. Rather, it was a shared journey towards peace and justice. Indeed, he argued that Christians following St Francis along that path need not fear losing their religious identity. It was precisely there that they could find it.
As Benedict XVI, he would go on to praise the original gathering and convene another himself in 2011, this time also inviting agnostics and nonbelievers.
In a letter marking the twentieth anniversary, Benedict had explained that peace required both the “horizontal” dimension of human relationships and the “vertical” dimension of humanity’s relationship with God. Prayer was not merely something added to a peace campaign, but something reaching into the very convictions by which people lived.
It is something Bishop Leahy also recognises in the more ordinary business of meeting another person: “If I’m in conversation with somebody, if I’m genuinely encountering somebody, well, I am sharing who I am and what I am and what I believe. That should be going on in any genuine dialogue.”
There is no need, he suggested, to hide one’s convictions, or to approach the other person as a prospective convert to be won. Real conversation means listening, too, and being willing to learn. Faith, he explained, must be more than a doctrine one possesses. It must become a lived experience, something one can naturally share with others.
The work of peace
What began as a day of prayer in Assisi would gradually become something more. From 1987, the Community of Sant’Egidio carried its spirit into annual international peace meetings, building relationships across religious and political divisions. Its later mediation work, including efforts that contributed to Mozambique’s 1992 peace agreement, offers an example of what sustained conversation can make possible, even if that agreement cannot be attributed directly to the 1986 meeting.
Friendship requires more than assuming everybody is basically the same. It takes curiosity about lives and beliefs which may be quite unlike our own”
John Paul II never intended prayer to stand in place of action. “Although prayer is in itself action, this does not excuse us from working for peace,” he told the gathering. Peace, he said, was a workshop open to all. The work starts not only with diplomats but with neighbours, classmates and colleagues.
Bishop Leahy calls this the “dialogue of life”.
“People are just simply getting to know each other as friends, as neighbours, as work colleagues,” he said. And while the point sounds modest, ordinary even, friendship requires more than assuming everybody is basically the same. It takes curiosity about lives and beliefs which may be quite unlike our own.
The fortieth anniversary has prompted another international peace meeting in Assisi, organised for October 25–27 under the theme ‘Unarmed and Disarming Peace’. Pope Leo XIV cancelled his planned attendance but announced that he would send a message to those gathered.
The Irish bishops also marked the anniversary at their autumn meeting, welcoming a new Vatican document on the legacy of Nostra Aetate and praying that the occasion might help bring about Pope Leo’s call for a “disarmed and disarming peace”.
Published in September, the document offers a timely clarification of what such fraternity demands. “It is not a matter of founding one great world religion in which all beliefs are flattened,” it states. Instead, religious dialogue must recognise differences rather than pretend they do not exist.
Beyond coexistence
Looking again at the photograph, it might call to mind those familiar ‘COEXIST’ bumper stickers, with the symbols of different religions slotted neatly into a single word. The appeal for people to get along is fair enough. But there is something hollow about a vision of tolerance which, even as it celebrates diversity, risks flattening the very differences it claims to honour.
These are not interchangeable symbols, nor systems from which we can pick whatever takes our fancy. They make claims about reality itself: God, humanity, and the seen and unseen worlds.
The people in that photograph did not have to pretend otherwise. They stood together not because their differences had ceased to matter, but because peace matters too.