Smith emphasized the cumulative history and the personal faith experience of each religion. He raised the reactionary lay order Opus Dei to the status of a “personal prelature”-the only personal prelature in the Church-directly responsible to him. As a spiritual teacher and mentor, the Hierophant promotes personal growth and development by offering guidance and wisdom. For John Paul, it was an irresistible, ur-ecumenical occasion, with everyone praying together in what was described by a spokesman for Sant’Egidio as “an unconditional opening to the religion of the other.” Justo Lacunza-Balda, a Spanish brother who until last year ran the Pontifical Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, told me, “The Pope’s reasons for Assisi I were maybe a little fuzzy . They complained endlessly, if privately, about his style, which was famously demonstrated on a trip to Paris, in the early eighties, when he raced through a High Mass at Notre-Dame in order to stop at a pilgrimage shrine and chapel on the Rue du Bac, where he kissed the ground and started praying. Everything is ‘order.’ When he says that homosexuality is a disorder, that divorce and remarriage is a disorder-he can’t find any exceptions to ‘order.’ ” (Catholics still argue about the role he played, as Archbishop of Munich and Freising in the late seventies, in the Vatican’s decision to strip Hans Küng of the right to teach Catholic theology, on the ground of what could be called Küng’s “doctrinal disorder.”) He made an exceptionally effective Grand Inquisitor at the Holy Office, censuring outspoken priests and literally silencing the liberation theologians who were reviving the Church in South America.

The same conservative bishops who later applauded his insistence that abstinence, not condoms, was the answer to Africa’s AIDS crisis considered the embrace, or “dialogue,” that he extended to the world, including the Islamic world, to be, at best, naïve or messianic and, at worst, theologically irresponsible or indifferent. The center offers classes on various aspects of Islam, including Quranic studies, Arabic language courses, Islamic history, and jurisprudence. The first gathering, known today as Assisi I, was a common prayer: a hodgepodge of interfaith holiness convoked by the gurus of the Community of Sant’Egidio, blessed by the Pope, supervised by the head of his Commission for Justice and Peace, the French cardinal Roger Etchegaray, and including among the faithful a Crow medicine man named John Pretty-on-Top, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, the president of Morocco’s High Council of Ulemas, and the Dalai Lama. That view is reflected in the daily decisions of bishops who in the past few years have denied the sacraments to pro-choice politicians (St. Louis); refused to allow Muslims to pray at a church that was once a mosque (Córdoba); and denied Catholic burial to an incurably ailing man who, after years of suffering on a respirator, asked to die (Rome).

He believes God has given Christians a wonderful gift through his son Jesus Christ – the man who ensured an abundant and everlasting life that few of us are fortunate enough to see. Every Muslim who is capable of travel, and can afford the trip, is to travel to the city of Mecca at least once during their lifetime. Although specific scores are never revealed, it can probably be assumed that if he knocked off a drug cartel or illegal weapons ring, he could easily be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. In some countries, respondents are less likely to say that prayer is an important part of daily life than they are to say that God is important in their lives. A case in point is the two big prayer gatherings for peace that took place in Assisi during John Paul’s papacy, the first in 1986 and the second in 2002, two and a half years before the Pope died. His papacy, he said, was going to be a peace papacy-a papacy of bridges. God’s intentions tend to wobble from papacy to papacy, and the Church adjusts to the contradictions. The Church that Karol Wojtyla and, after him, Joseph Ratzinger inherited is in some ways as old and as new as that.

Ratzinger and Wojtyla shared this: an exceptionally narrow view of what constitutes a morally acceptable Christian life. Ratzinger did not really think that theological dialogue with non-Christians was useful, or meaningful, or even possible. If you think about it, many characters just wouldn’t look right if you took away their signature hats atop their heads. His loyalty, as he saw it, was to Christianity and not to (to his mind) errant Christians. But it was at Regensburg’s theology department that he honed his belief that the discourse of Christianity is a fundamentally rational discourse-as the West, grounded in Greek philosophical inquiry, understands reason-and as such not ultimately comprehensible, even for argument’s sake, outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. Roughly one-quarter of Americans are now religiously unaffiliated, a trend that is largely the result of Americans leaving their childhood religious tradition. The 2011 census asked those living in Scotland to state their religious affiliations. The term Bangsamoro is a combination of an Old Malay word meaning nation or state with the Spanish word Moro which means Muslim. Unlike Ratzinger, he was not much concerned about whether a Trinitarian faith with an anthropomorphic God was “comprehensible” to a Muslim whose God is never manifest.