ROME – Pope Francis, head of the Catholic Church, delivered two very different messages regarding relationships between the different religions of the world. Last week, he spoke of the possibility of cooperation and understanding between faiths in Southeast Asia, but this week, at home in Italy, the Pope made sure to excise modern Pagans who incorporate magic into their practices from the interfaith community.
Three weeks ago, Pope Francis began a tour of Oceania and Southeast Asia. His tour included Indonesia, which is home to the largest population of Muslims worldwide, with around 242 million adherents.
When Francis arrived in Indonesia, he aimed to support Indonesia’s Catholic community and celebrate interfaith harmony in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. Francis was welcomed in Jakarta with a traditional ceremony, receiving a bouquet of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. The Vatican announced that the 87-year-old pope would rest before meeting with refugees, migrants, and the sick later that day.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo welcomed the pope, saying in a broadcast statement that “Indonesia and the Vatican have the same commitment to fostering peace and brotherhood, as well as ensuring the welfare of humanity.”
The Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican [Photo Credit: MJTM 2024
During his visit, the pope highlighted his papacy’s consistent concern about environmental health. In his encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis identified the Earth as our “common home,” emphasizing that all people share the responsibility to care for it. He has consistently called for interfaith cooperation in tackling environmental challenges, stating that “the urgent challenge to protect our common home includes a concern to bring the whole human family together to seek a sustainable and integral development, for we know that things can change.”
For Pope Francis, addressing the ecological crisis requires dialogue not only among religions but also with the international community, in national and local policies, in decision-making processes, politics, economics, and between religion and science. He stresses the importance of “entering into dialogue with all people about our common home.”
That specific topic has become both a hallmark of Francis’ pontificate and a core of interreligious dialogue across all faiths, including the branches of Wicca and Paganism.
Pope Francis highlighted the need for such collaboration, particularly focusing on interfaith dialogue during the first and last days of his journey. In both Indonesia and Singapore, each with distinct models of interreligious coexistence and national development, the pope stressed the importance of stepping beyond comfort zones.
In Singapore, Francis engaged with youths from various faiths shortly before his departure. In this wealthy, religiously diverse microstate — recently ranked by the Pew Research Center as the most religiously diverse country in the world — interreligious harmony is crucial.
At the meeting, Francis said:
One of the things that has impressed me most about the young people here is your capacity for interfaith dialogue. This is very important because if you start arguing, “My religion is more important than yours…” or “Mine is the true one, yours is not true…” Where does this lead? Somebody answer.
[A young person answers, “Destruction.”]
That is correct. All religions are paths to God. I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. “But my God is more important than yours!” Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian. Understood? Yet, interfaith dialogue among young people takes courage. The age of youth is the age of courage, but you can misuse this courage to do things that will not help you. Instead, you should have courage to move forward and to dialogue.
The pope departed from his prepared speech to engage directly with the young people, urging them to be open to criticism and challenge. He made them repeat the words “Take Risks! Take Risks!”—a new call to action for interfaith dialogue and cooperation.
But today in St. Peter’s Square, during the pope’s weekly Wednesday General Audience at the Vatican, the message was notably different. It was significant, as the 500th such general audience of his pontificate.
The pope addressed the intersection of technology and modern society, highlighting the dangers facing the world. Most mainstream and religious media outlets focused on online pornography as the central theme of the pope’s message.
However, that wasn’t the only point he made. Unfortunately, Pope Francis’s speech today did not show the same ecumenical spirit toward modern Pagan religions as he displayed in Southeast Asia last week.
“Today we are witnessing a strange phenomenon regarding the devil,” he said, speaking in Italian. “At a certain cultural level, it is believed that he simply does not exist. He is considered a symbol of the collective unconscious, or of alienation, in short, a metaphor. But ‘the devil’s greatest trick is to make us believe he does not exist,’ as someone wrote (Charles Baudelaire). He is cunning: he makes us believe he does not exist and thus dominates everything. He is crafty.
“Yet our technological and secularized world is full of magicians, occultism, spiritualism, astrologers, sellers of spells and amulets, and unfortunately real satanic sects,” he continued. “Chased out the door, the devil has come back, one might say, through the window. Chased out of faith, he returns with superstition. And if you are superstitious, you are unconsciously dialoguing with the devil. You cannot dialogue with the devil.”
He went on to praise the accomplishments of modern technology but called out “online pornography” as a Satanic instrument. “Because any smartphone has access to this brutality, to this language of the devil.”
Francis closed by quoting the Veni Creator hymn:
“Drive far away our wily Foe,
And Thine abiding peace bestow;
If Thou be our protecting Guide,
No evil can our steps betide.”
The choice of topic remains unclear, as do the reasons why certain practices were identified. Most Catholic reports, along with commentary from Catholic priests, suggested it was a broader dialogue on sin for the occasion.
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