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Three of Pope Leo XIV’s cardinals published a document on Wednesday that he had approved back in June, and by Thursday a bishop whom Pope Francis removed from office was telling Catholics to reject it.
The note carries the title “A Journey of Hope: Sixty Years of Interreligious Dialogue and Fraternity in the Light of the Conciliar Declaration Nostra Aetate.”
It runs roughly 8,600 words and bears the signatures of Cardinals Víctor Manuel Fernández, Kurt Koch, and George Koovakad (the prefects for doctrine, Christian unity, and interreligious dialogue).
Its occasion is the sixtieth anniversary of the shortest text the Second Vatican Council produced, which Paul VI promulgated on October 28, 1965, after the bishops passed it 2,221 votes to 88.
Nostra Aetate, the cardinals remind us, was born as an answer to antisemitism, “which culminated in the Shoah,” before it grew into the Church’s charter for its relations with every religion, and the note holds that line: God’s covenant with the Jewish people “is irrevocable,” even as “the Church teaches that Christ is the one and only Redeemer.”
Koch put it this way: “it is impossible to be a disciple of Jesus Christ and at the same time an antisemite.”
The passage drawing fire sits at paragraph 54.
“The defensive entrenchment in one’s own position and the view that proselytism is the only way to engage with the other no longer make sense,” the cardinals write, “in a world that increasingly resembles an interconnected and constantly evolving global village.” The next paragraph calls for “a new ethic of dialogue: a culture of complexity, flexibility, and friendship.” The same document rules out “one great world religion in which all beliefs are flattened,” and it insists that dialogue “must be free of ambiguity, avoiding relativism and syncretism.”
Joseph Strickland, whom Francis removed as bishop of Tyler, Texas, in November 2023, read paragraph 54 and posted his verdict on X. “This Vatican statement must be rejected and repudiated by all who hold that Jesus Christ and His Church are the only way to the Father,” he wrote.
He went on: “The Truth is not in constant evolution. The Truth is Jesus Christ present with us in the world, and His Church is the vehicle of our salvation.” In a longer statement carried by LifeSiteNews, he said the faithful “may reasonably ask whether dialogue has been placed above evangelization.”
Koovakad, who runs the dicastery Strickland is attacking, called dialogue “a constitutive dimension of the evangelizing mission,” which is what the Church has taught since Paul VI created the Secretariat for Non-Christians in 1964. Strip away the paragraph numbers, and Strickland’s quarrel is with the 2,221 bishops who voted yes and the six popes who have taught it.
He has company.
The same corner of the American Church raged when the Vatican Library opened a small prayer room for Muslim scholars last October; Leo answered from the Middle East a month later, standing shoeless and silent inside Istanbul’s Blue Mosque and telling Christians to stop fearing Islam.
Pope Leo XIV takes questions from reporters aboard the papal flight from Beirut to Rome on Dec. 2, 2025, where he said Christians “should perhaps be a little less fearful” of Islam. (Vatican Media via DRM News)
When the pope defended the Council’s reform of the Mass in August, the reaction was the same.
In May, Fernández warned the Society of St. Pius X, whose founder called the 1986 Assisi prayer meeting “an immense scandal,” that its planned consecrations would be a schismatic act.
Sixty years ago 88 bishops said no, and their heirs are still saying it.
The note reads in a way like a diary of Leo’s own pontificate.
On the day of his election, he wrote to Rabbi Noam Marans of the American Jewish Committee, pledging “to continue and strengthen the Church’s dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate.”
Eleven days later, receiving leaders of other religions, he told them, “Now is the time for dialogue and building bridges.”
On October 28, 2025, sixty years to the day after Paul VI signed the declaration, Leo gathered heads of world religions and the diplomatic corps in the Paul VI Hall during the Jubilee of Hope.
He called the chapter on the Jews “the heart and generative core of the entire Declaration,” and he described dialogue in terms the cardinals would echo eleven months later.
“Dialogue is not a tactic or a tool, but a way of life — a journey of the heart that transforms everyone involved, the one who listens and the one who speaks,” he said.
“For authentic dialogue begins not in compromise, but in conviction — in the deep roots of our own belief that give us the strength to reach out to others in love.”
At his general audience the next morning, he told the crowd that “the Church does not tolerate antisemitism and fights against it, on the basis of the Gospel itself.” In Istanbul a month later, he signed a joint declaration with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew that cited Nostra Aetate by name and rejected “any use of religion and the name of God to justify violence.”
Leo has kept a religion and a state apart from the beginning.
After Israel struck Gaza’s Holy Family parish in July 2025, he demanded a ceasefire and an end to “the barbarity of war,” and by September he was telling reporters that Gaza has “no future based on violence, forced exile, and vengeance.”
At that same October audience he asked Catholics and Jews not to let “political circumstances and the injustices of some” divert them from friendship. Criticizing Netanyahu’s bombardment and holding Jews in contempt are different acts, and he has never confused them.
Three weeks after he closed the Jubilee’s Holy Door in January, on the day after Holocaust Remembrance Day, he prayed for “a world without any more antisemitism, prejudice, oppression or persecution of any human being.”
In June he received the UJA-Federation of New York, the first such visit to the Vatican in sixty-six years. The cardinals quote him at length because the note is, in large part, a record of what he has already done.
Strickland has the direction of the argument backward. In that same hall Leo quoted the Council’s own words, that the Church “rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions,” and in the same breath he said we walk the journey “not by abandoning our own faith, but by standing firmly within it.”
Conviction comes first, and the encounter follows from it. A Catholic who cannot sit beside a rabbi or an imam without fearing for his own soul has told you something about the size of his faith, and it is not what he thinks.
The American stakes are not academic.
The note names “the political manipulation of religion” as one of the forces that compels the Church to renew its dialogue, and Americans know what that looks like: swastikas carried through the streets of Dearborn ahead of an anti-Islam rally, and pundits (Laura Loomer and Raymond Arroyo among them) raging at the pope over a prayer room in a library.
Nostra Aetate was written by men who had watched what Christian contempt for the Jews made possible in Europe. Leo has spent sixteen months applying their lesson to a country where contempt is once again a political program.
The 88 lost in 1965. They are losing again, this time to an American pope who learned his Catholicism in the suburbs of Chicago and his priesthood in northern Peru. Strickland says the Truth does not evolve. Neither does the Council’s instruction, and Leo is the pope carrying it out.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV, with the rabbis and imams who filled the Paul VI Hall last October, and with the millions of American Catholics (and countless others of goodwill) who understand that a faith strong enough to sit beside a stranger is the only kind worth having.
In a country where contempt for the outsider is being sold as fidelity, we remain rooted in a Gospel that calls every human being a child of the same Father, and in a Council that told the Church to reject nothing that is true and holy wherever it is found.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than the fear being preached at them. They want a faith with the courage to open its door.
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“This statement from the Vatican must be rejected and repudiated” sounds like the sort of thing one says when one is cruising for an excommunication.
Strickland (¿strychnine?) may declare, "The Truth is not in constant evolution . . . ."🤔
Possible true in truth being an asolute or Platonist ieal, beyond human capacity to articulate.✨
Strickland fails to understand is that our knowledge of the of Truth constantly evolves.💡