Massimo Faggioli discusses Pope Francis’s efforts to meet and dialogue with the leaders of Islam.

One of Pope Francis’s enduring priorities is improving the Church’s relations with Islam and the Arab world. Francis’s February trip to the United Arab Emirates was a sign that he remains committed to this project. It was not the first such trip (in 2017 he went to Cairo for a peace conference at al-Azhar, one of the most prestigious theological institutions in Sunni Islam, and in March this year he went to Morocco); nor will it be the last.

Francis chose the UAE because he wanted to continue his dialogue with the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, the Egyptian Ahmed el-Tayeb. Imam el-Tayeb is a complex figure: both conservative and a reformer, he is an opponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and has been critical of Israel. He has also rejected terrorism, and went to pay his respects to the victims of the 2015 massacre at the Bataclan in Paris. El-Tayeb may prove to be problematic within the Muslim world, but for now at least, he is considered the best Muslim interlocutor for Francis.

Support of Christian Minority

Francis may also have chosen the UAE to give greater visibility to its significant Catholic population — close to 1 million — almost all of them migrant labourers from Asia. Their situation is better than that of religious minorities in some other Arab- and Muslim-majority countries, but it is nevertheless precarious. The religious tolerance they enjoy is still quite limited by Western standards.

In planning his papal visits, Francis has always given special attention to countries where Catholics and Christians are a small minority. On the Arabian Peninsula, Roman Catholics live as a minority in the cradle of Islam. They are also a minority within a minority: Catholics of the Roman rite are just one of the many ancient Christian communities. Francis’s trip to the UAE served to highlight the diversity of Christian traditions in the Middle East, some of which go back to the first centuries of the Church.

Political Significance of Visit

Francis’s trip to the Emirates was significant for three reasons. The first has to do with politics. In visiting the UAE, Pope Francis gave new visibility not only to the Christians there but also to the political initiatives of the government, which, despite its reforms, is hardly an emblem of liberal democracy.

The emir of Abu Dhabi appoints the prime minister, who consults with a federal council of 40 members. Legislation is based on sharia, which prescribes the death penalty for various crimes. Foreign-born residents make up more than 80 per cent of the population, but their basic human rights are very often not respected.

There was a high risk that the pope’s visit would be manipulated by the UAE government to contrast its relatively tolerant version of Islam with that of some of its neighbours. But that contrast can be misleading, especially in the West.

The UAE spends a huge amount of its budget on weapon systems and, together with Saudi Arabia, funds the brutal war against the Houthis in Yemen.

But it would be a mistake to understand Francis’s visit as an endorsement of the regime. The pope is not naïve, and he made his position on the war in Yemen quite clear. In fact, just before leaving the Vatican for his flight to the Emirates, he pleaded in the Angelus prayer for an end to that war, fully aware of the UAE’s involvement.

Francis has always been willing to talk with anyone willing to talk, including political leaders with dirty hands. It is part of his global engagement, from Raúl Castro in Cuba to Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.

Religious Significance of Meeting

But of course the trip’s main significance was religious. It marked a new stage in the Church’s relations with Islam. Francis’s trips to Morocco and the UAE are part of an ongoing effort at improving interreligious relations that began with Vatican II.

As Francis pointed out during an in-flight press conference, the Document on Human Fraternity that he and Ahmed el-Tayeb signed is perfectly in keeping with conciliar teaching: “From the Catholic point of view, the document does not pull away one millimetre from Vatican II, which is even cited a few times. The document was made in the spirit of Vatican II.”

Insofar as there’s a difference between Pope Francis and his predecessors on this issue, it’s his emphasis on fraternity: but this too can be traced back to Vatican II. While the word “dialogue” represents something like an instrument of interreligious relations, the whole intuition of Vatican II was about the fraternity of the one human family.

In a technical sense, Pope Francis has never engaged in theological discussions that advance interreligious dialogue, where there have been few breakthroughs in recent years. Instead he has concentrated on underscoring the values that members of other religious communities share with Christians.

Significance for the Church

Finally, Francis’s trip to the UAE has a theological significance within the Catholic Church itself. The Document on Human Fraternity signed by Francis and el-Tayeb in Abu Dhabi has raised new concerns among those already suspicious of this pope’s orthodoxy.

In a hierarchical Church still largely shaped by Joseph Ratzinger, where theological clarity is understood to require a rejection of any appearance of compromise, a joint document cosigned by the Grand Imam of al-Azhar was bound to cause controversy.

But the Document on Human Fraternity shows its roots in the Roman Catholic tradition quite clearly, and it is at least as challenging to Muslims as it is to Catholics.

It talks about “the pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings” and rejects theological pretexts for war: “We resolutely declare that religions must never incite war, hateful attitudes, hostility and extremism, nor must they incite violence or the shedding of blood. These tragic realities are the consequence of a deviation from religious teachings.”

It would be absurd to claim that Francis sold out to his Muslim interlocutor. The document also includes commitments in respect to religious liberty and to citizenship for minorities — commitments that wouldn’t be at all easy to honour in some parts of the Muslim world.

In a sense, Francis brought the entire global Church with him to visit Abu Dhabi, drawing everyone’s attention to a local Christian community composed almost entirely of immigrants who are tolerated but not always respected by their non-Christian neighbours, and exploited by an economic system that produces luxury for the native-born population.

We could say that Francis celebrated Mass for the country’s serfs. The Mass was the most stunning and moving part of the pope’s trip to Abu Dhabi. It was the first public Mass celebrated in the UAE, and there were 125,000 people of 100 different nationalities in attendance. There were Chaldeans, Coptic Christians, Greek-Catholics, Melkites, Maronites, and Syriac Catholics, among others.

The pope gathered the Catholic Church in its universality, in a stadium, to celebrate the Eucharist, and to acknowledge and encourage a group of Christians living in extremely difficult conditions, a group politically neglected, culturally ignored, and all but invisible to many of their coreligionists in the West.

Like the Document on Human Fraternity, the stadium Mass showed how different the intra-Catholic debate about liberalism looks when seen through the eyes of Catholic minorities living in Muslim countries. For them, liberty is a scarce treasure rather than an outmoded abstraction.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 242 October 2019: 4-5