Pope Leo XIV’s four-nation African tour marks a return to extensive papal travel while advancing Pope Francis’ legacy of Catholic-Islamic fraternity and dialogue.
Newsroom (05/05/2026 Gaudium Press ) Pope Leo XIV arrived in Algeria to begin a tour of four African nations, selecting a destination rich with spiritual and diplomatic significance. Home to sites associated with St. Augustine, Algeria represented more than a pilgrimage through historical Christian territory—it symbolized the Pope’s commitment to what he termed “crossing and strengthening bridges that are very important for the world and the Church today.”
In his remarks to the general audience, Leo articulated three crucial bridges: one reaching back to the Fathers of the Church, another extending toward the Islamic world, and a third embracing the African continent itself. The emphasis on Islamic relations was particularly notable given Algeria’s majority Muslim population and the pressing reality of Islamist violence against Christians throughout parts of Africa, especially in Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation.
The papal journey carried added weight during its timing. Leo’s comments on Catholic-Islamic relations unfolded on the first anniversary of Pope Francis’ death, a moment that prompted reflection on the theological and diplomatic foundations his predecessor had laid across the Muslim world.
A Return to Papal Grandeur
Leo’s African expedition marks a dramatic shift in papal travel patterns. For decades following the extensive global tours of St. John Paul II during the 1980s and 1990s, the Church had largely abandoned marathon pilgrimages. John Paul II’s final extended journey—an 11-day visit to North America in 2002 for World Youth Day in Toronto and the canonization of Juan Diego in Mexico City—signaled the beginning of the end for such undertakings. Even that trip required several days of papal rest near Toronto before the main events.
Under Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, papal journeys became notably shorter. Francis famously traveled to Strasbourg for merely four hours in 2014. Yet at 70 years old—the youngest pope in 36 years—Leo possesses the physical vigor to undertake what his recent predecessors could not.
The sole exception to shorter papal travel came in 2024, Francis’s final year. Determined to complete a journey originally scheduled for 2020, the aging pontiff embarked on a 12-day marathon across Indonesia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and Singapore. Traveling to the other side of the world in a wheelchair, Francis demonstrated that his commitment to interfaith dialogue transcended physical limitation. That journey, postponed by the pandemic, symbolized the priority he placed on reaching out to the Muslim world.
John Paul II and the Jewish Question
To understand the significance of Leo’s emphasis on Islamic relations, context matters. For St. John Paul II, the dominant interreligious priority was Jewish-Catholic relations—a connection he insisted was not truly “inter-religious” but rather familial, a matter of remaining household members. Three moments crystallized John Paul’s Jewish engagement: his 1979 homily at Auschwitz, his 1986 visit to Rome’s synagogue, and his 2000 pilgrimage to Israel.
Islamic affairs, by contrast, remained peripheral to John Paul’s pontificate. Though he became the first pope to enter a mosque when he visited the Great Mosque of Damascus in 2001—just months before 9/11—Islam was never his signature issue. That changed with his successor.
Benedict’s Courage and the Regensburg Breakthrough
Pope Benedict XVI seized upon the urgency of the Islamic question with directness following 9/11. On the fifth anniversary of the attacks, he delivered the Regensburg Address, a speech that would reverberate through Catholic-Islamic relations for years to come. Benedict spoke forcefully against advancing faith through violence and examined the failures of reason within Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic traditions alike.
His specific observations about violence’s historical role in Islam ignited fierce controversy. Violent protests erupted globally. Some of those murdered by Islamist extremists in the address’s aftermath—including Sister Leonella Sgorbati, an Italian missionary in Somalia—were later beatified by Francis in 2018.
Yet from this apparent crisis emerged genuine breakthrough. Henry Kissinger would later characterize Benedict’s address as the most important statement on Islam in the post-9/11 era. Its perspicacity and courage resonated sufficiently among Islamic leaders that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a historic visit to Benedict at the Vatican in 2007, a watershed moment in modern diplomatic history.
Seismic Shifts in Global Islam
Pope Francis inherited a Muslim world undergoing profound transformation. Two major shifts shaped his pontificate’s approach to Islamic relations.
The first, more widely noted, involved Saudi Arabia’s internal reformation under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The House of Saud moderated its Islamic fundamentalism domestically while reducing support for jihad abroad. This new Saudi Arabia permits women to drive, hosts professional wrestling with female competitors, and became the first destination of President Donald Trump during both his presidential terms.
The second shift—more theologically significant—centered on Indonesia and the rise of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU). As the world’s largest Muslim organization with approximately 100 million members in the most populous Muslim-majority nation, NU developed indigenous Islamic theological resources to advance a fraternal, less aggressive Islamic identity. Notably, NU has championed the concept that “citizenship”—available to all regardless of faith—should constitute the fundamental civic identity rather than distinctions between Muslims and non-believers.
When Indonesia hosted the G20 summit in 2022, NU convened an accompanying “R20” summit of global religious leaders. Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, attended as keynote speaker, recognizing in NU’s work an effort to ground the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in deeper religious foundations. The organization’s leader spoke openly of drawing guidance from Vatican II texts.
Francis, Fraternity, and the Abu Dhabi Declaration
It was precisely because of these Islamic developments that Pope Francis made fraternity with Muslims a defining theme of his 27-year pontificate. On the papal plane during the first anniversary of his death, Pope Leo XIV identified fraternity as the essential legacy of his predecessor.
“We can recall many things [about Pope Francis],” Leo stated. “For example, universal fraternity; seeking to foster genuine respect for all men and women; promoting this spirit of fraternity, of being brothers and sisters to one another, of seeking to live out the message we find in the Gospel whilst recognizing this spirit of brotherhood amongst all.”
The pinnacle of this fraternal outreach arrived in February 2019 when Pope Francis and Ahmed Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar in Cairo, signed the Document on Human Fraternity in Abu Dhabi. The document’s theological imprecision regarding God’s “permissive will” versus his “aboriginal intent” concerning religious pluralism sparked clarifications within Catholic circles, yet the document’s true significance transcended papal penmanship.
The Grand Imam’s signature represented the landmark. Al-Azhar and its leader had not historically regarded Christians and Jews with brotherly warmth. His endorsement signaled a turning point that the Holy See deliberately amplified and elevated, recognizing hopeful Muslim developments led by Islam’s preeminent scholarly authority.
The Abu Dhabi declaration found physical expression in the Abrahamic Family House, a striking architectural complex housing a church, mosque, and synagogue beneath a unified roof—a visible testament to interfaith aspiration.
Martyrdom and Memory
Yet affirmations of fraternity, however necessary, cannot stand alone as response to brutality. Anti-Christian violence has marked recent decades with horrifying episodes. The Easter Sunday massacres in Sri Lanka in 2019 and the slaughter of 21 Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach in 2015 demonstrated that theological declarations alone do not arrest the violence.
Significantly, Pope Francis added those Coptic martyrs—though not Catholic—to the Roman Martyrology in 2023, an addition that was theologically imprecise but widely welcomed. Their relics were venerated in St. Peter’s Basilica months before Francis undertook his final Indonesian pilgrimage.
The Algerian church itself bears witness to sacrifice. The martyrs of Algeria, murdered between 1994 and 1996 and beatified under Francis in 2018, have their feast day on May 8—the precise date of Pope Leo XIV’s election in 2025.
Pluralism and Catholic Confidence
The Islamic initiatives of Pope Francis encountered resistance from some quarters, particularly those who had opposed John Paul’s Jewish overtures and feared that exclusive claims to Catholic truth were being sacrificed. Such anxiety, however, rested on misreading. Francis began his pontificate declaring that “when we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.”
As the late Father Richard John Neuhaus observed, a sentiment echoed by Professor Glendon’s work in Indonesia, “pluralism is written into the script of history.” He continued: “The Church is not intimidated by pluralism, for pluralism is the inevitable consequence of freedom, and the Church is the world’s premier champion of freedom.”
In his assessment of Pope Francis’s legacy, Leo correctly emphasized fraternity. It was the subject of Francis’s final encyclical and the driving force behind that arduous final journey to Indonesia, where—despite persistent violence—he sought “a face of Islam which offers a fraternal smile.”
- Raju Hasmukh with files from NC Register
Related Images:
