The Vatican is stepping up its alliance with a pan-Islamic organization alleged to have provided “material support” to al-Qaeda’s 9/11 terrorist operation as well as to have funded terrorism and the global propagation of hardline Wahhabi Islam.
As part of recent efforts at re-branding its image through “religious diplomacy,” the Saudi-sponsored Muslim World League (MWL) hosted the Vatican’s envoy to the United Nations (U.N.) for a book presentation on interreligious dialogue.
Archbishop Ivan Jurkoviè, the Holy See’s permanent observer to the U.N. in Geneva, delivered a keynote address in Jeddah on the book The Promotion of Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue as an Instrument for Peace and Fraternity, stressing the Vatican’s developing relationship that began under Pope Francis in 2017.
Making no mention of Christ or the gospel, Jurkoviè instead extolled the “polychromatic light of religions” that illuminates this world and “does not contrast the individual colours by putting them in antithesis to one another; rather, it combines them in a non-conflictual vision.”