The Pope was thus responding to the invitation of the civil and religious authorities, King Hamad of Bahrain and the Muslim Council of Elders.
Francis delivered a speech before this Council, at the mosque of the Royal Sakhir Palace in Awali, on Friday, November 4, 2022. He was first greeted by the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, with whom he signed, on February 4, 2019, in Abu Dhabi, the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together.
In his read intervention, the Pope pronounced a word which appears as a negation of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the text: “In a world that is increasingly wounded and divided, that beneath the surface of globalization senses anxiety and fear, the great religious traditions must be the heart that unites the members of the body, the soul that gives hope and life to its highest aspirations.”
There is only one Lord of humanity and one King who unites the members of His mystical body; a single Spirit which is like the soul of this body; and one God, Jesus Christ, who can “give hope to the highest aspirations”: salvation and the eternal vision of God that will meet and surpass the highest conceivable desires.
And all men are called to be part of the Mystical Body of Christ by the grace of God. No other “religion” or so-called religion can give any “hope” or “life to the highest aspirations” of man.
None of them can be a “heart that unites the members” except by a merely human association, totally incapable of effecting this marvelous union between its members by grace.
None of them was founded by God: they are the fruit of human invention, and teach doctrines incompatible with the immutable Truth which is Christ, the eternal Word of God.
How then could these religions be “the heart that unites the members of the body”? The conception that points behind these words is always the same: all religions must constitute a kind of MSAUD, or Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy, according to the very happy formula of Fr. Georges de Nantes.
All of this can only lead to a profound indifferentism, to a disaffection of Catholics for their religion, which they think more and more should only be a veneer over civil and political society, sprinkled with a pseudo-charity with hints of naturalism.
Pope Francis made a trip to the Kingdom of Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf, from November 3 to 6, 2022, to attend a forum entitled: “Bahrain Forum for Dialogue: East and West for Human Coexistence.”