Pope Leo XIV asks to build peace and unity through interreligious dialogue

Pope Leo XIV addressed a message to the participants in an interreligious meeting held in Bangladesh under the motto “to promote a culture of harmony between brothers and sisters.”

When referring to this encounter, the Holy Father stressed that “reflects the spirit of fraternal opening that people of good will seek to foster with members of other religious traditions.”

“As a single family, we share the opportunity and responsibility of continuing to cultivate a culture of harmony and peace,” he added.

The Pontiff emphasized below the importance of culture, understood as the “rich heritage of arts, ideas and social institutions that characterizes each people”, as well as “the environment that nourishes and sustains its people.”

For the Holy Father, the culture “must be carefully cultivated” and said that “requires the light of the Sun of truth, the water of charity and the soil of freedom and justice.”

In this context, he pointed out that, when the culture of harmony is neglected, “weeds can drown peace. Distrust rootes; stereotypes harden; extremists exploit fears to sow division.”

“Together, as partners in the interreligious dialogue, we are like gardeners who take care of this fraternity field, helping to keep the dialogue already to start the weeds of the prejudice,” he said.

The meeting that takes place in Bangladesh from September 6 to 12 is for Pope Leo XIV a “beautiful testimony” that the differences of creed or origin “do not have to divide us.”

“On the contrary, in the act of finding ourselves in friendship and dialogue, we join against the forces of division, hate and violence that have affected humanity too often,” he said.

The Holy Father also encouraged participants Remembering Pope Francis’s words: “Where others have sown distrust, we chose trust; where others could foster fear, we seek understanding; where others see differences such as barriers, we recognize them as ways of mutual enrichment.”

For Leo XIV, building a culture of harmony means sharing not only ideas, “but also concrete experiences.” To do this, he stressed that it is essential to “remain together at the service of the most vulnerable of society.”

Specifically, he said that Bangladesh “has witnessed inspiring examples of this unit in recent years, when people of different religions joined in solidarity and prayer before natural disasters or tragedies.”

“Cooperating in every good work,” said the Pontiff, “is an extremely effective antidote against the forces that would try to drag us towards hostility and aggression. When our dialogue is lived in concrete actions, a powerful message is transmitted: that peace, and not the conflict, is our most precious dream, and that building this peace is a task that we undertake together.”

The Holy Father also reaffirmed the commitment of the Catholic Church, while regretting the “misunderstandings or wounds of the past” that can “slow down our steps.”

Faced with this, he asked to encourage each other to persevere, remembering that each group discussion, each joint service or shared food project, each courtesy gesture towards a neighbor of another religion, “are bricks of what San Juan Paul II called ‘a civilization of love’.”

“May the Most High bless each of you, your families and communities. To bless your country with an increasingly deep harmony and peace. And to bless our world, which needs the light of fraternity so urgent,” concluded the Holy Father.