(30 July 2026)

On  June 25 of 2026 the leaders of fifteen religious confessions and traditions present in Italy signed a Pact entitled “The Italian Way of Dialogue: Religions in the Public Sphere and for Social Cohesion”[1]. The ceremony was held in the auditorium of the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome and brought together Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and Bahá’ís. The Pact gives formal standing to three years of work by the National Interreligious Table, which has met annually at the headquarters of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI) since 2023 as part of the Synodal Path of the Churches in Italy. A Youth Interreligious Table joined the process in 2024. Its delegates did not simply accompany their elders: they sat in the official sessions and helped draft the text, a contribution the Head of State would single out later the same day.

The ceremony was coordinated by the CEI National Office for Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue, directed by Fr Giuliano Savina. Cardinal Matteo Zuppi signed for the Italian Episcopal Conference. Livia Ottolenghi signed for the Union of Italian Jewish Communities and Rabbi Giuseppe Momigliano for the Italian Rabbinical Assembly; Imam Yahya Pallavicini for COREIS and Mustapha Hajraoui for the Italian Islamic Confederation; Daniele Garrone for the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy; Filippo Scianna for the Italian Buddhist Union and Alberto Aprea for Soka Gakkai; Svami Yogananda Ghiri for the Hindu communities and Cristin Cappelletti for the Bahá’ís, alongside Orthodox and Sikh representatives. Cardinal Zuppi’s address turned on the setting. The Ara Pacis, he observed, recalls the birth of a law designed to settle disputes without recourse to arms. He linked the Pact to two anniversaries — eighty years of the Italian Constitution, whose Article 4 on the right to labour the text deliberately cites, and forty years since the first Assisi gathering — and described it above all as a method: patient listening, trust built over time, and difference treated as an asset rather than a threat in a public square disfigured by polarisation. Daniele Garrone struck a complementary note. The prophecy of the “secular city,” he remarked, has not been borne out; religion has returned to public relevance, for better and, where it is instrumentalised, for worse.

That afternoon the signatories, accompanied by the young delegates, were received at the Quirinale Palace by the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and presented him with a copy of the Pact. The date was not incidental: Parliament had met in joint session that morning to mark eighty years since the opening of the Constituent Assembly. The President drew the two occasions together[2]. From that founding effort, he said, came the constitutional recognition of religious freedom as a basic dimension of personal liberty. Religious pluralism enriches civic life and strengthens democratic values; faith has an intimate dimension, but also a plural and collective one capable of sustaining peaceful coexistence. To bend religion into an instrument of hatred rather than peace is to betray it. Extremism and fundamentalism he dismissed as a mystifying oversimplification of a complex present, one that calls instead for the breadth of vision religious traditions are able to cultivate. Turning to the Mediterranean, he closed on a formula worth recording: recognising the other already nourishes peace, and meeting, dialogue and shared reflection multiply it.

The event repays more than reportage. In Casanova’s terms it is a further instance of deprivatization: religion re-entering the public sphere of civil society rather than the state, and doing so without claiming privilege or seeking confessional protection[3]. What the signatories offered was a contribution, framed in the vocabulary of constitutional democracy rather than of concordatarian bargaining. The method behind the Pact also bears on Roy’s diagnosis. Holy ignorance describes faith cut loose from culture — deterritorialised, deculturated, and for that reason available to fundamentalist reconstruction[4]. The Table has worked in the opposite direction, through slow acquaintance, communal rootedness, the visible authority of religious leadership, and the participation of young believers who are Italian by upbringing and formation. In legal terms the Pact is soft law generated from below. It neither substitutes for legislation nor pretends to, but it presses on the unfinished journey Alessandro Ferrari has traced: the missing general statute on religious freedom, and the intese still withheld from Islamic communities[5]. It likewise draws on the dialogical resources internal to religious legal traditions mapped by Silvio Ferrari[6], and offers a working instance of intercultural dialogue as a vehicle for the legal inclusion of diversity in Maria d’Arienzo’s sense[7]. The shape of the day — Ara Pacis in the morning, Quirinale in the afternoon — illustrated Giuseppe Dalla Torre’s account of laicità as distinction rather than hostile separation: a secularity grounded in the primacy of conscience, which does not confine faith to the private sphere but orders it toward the common good[8].

Having taken part in this process and in the signing, I would draw one conclusion from it. The Italian way offers Europe a model that can be repeated: interreligious dialogue not as diplomatic ceremony but as a method of building shared citizenship. The task now is continuity — giving the Table, and above all its younger members, the stable instruments a signature alone cannot supply.

                                                                                         Mustafa Cenap Aydın

[1]The text of the Pact, La via italiana del dialogo. Le religioni nello spazio pubblico e per la coesione sociale [The Italian Way of Dialogue: Religions in the Public Sphere and for Social Cohesion], is available on the website of the CEI National Office for Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue (unedi.chiesacattolica.it). For coverage of the ceremony see Agenzia SIR and ANSA, 25 June 2026.

[2]Saluto del Presidente della Repubblica, Sergio Mattarella, all’incontro con i rappresentanti delle comunità religiose in occasione della sottoscrizione del Patto “La via italiana del dialogo interreligioso”, Quirinale Palace, 25 June 2026, at www.quirinale.it. Translations from the Italian are my own.

[3] J. Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994.

[4] O. Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, Hurst, London, and Columbia University Press, New York, 2010 (first published as La sainte ignorance. Le temps de la religion sans culture, Seuil, Paris, 2008).

[5] A. Ferrari, La libertà religiosa in Italia. Un percorso incompiuto [Religious Freedom in Italy: An Unfinished Journey], Carocci, Rome, 2012.

[6] S. Ferrari, Lo spirito dei diritti religiosi. Ebraismo, cristianesimo e islam a confronto [The Spirit of Religious Laws: Judaism, Christianity and Islam Compared], il Mulino, Bologna, 2002.

[7] M. d’Arienzo, Pluralismo religioso e dialogo interculturale. L’inclusione giuridica delle diversità [Religious Pluralism and Intercultural Dialogue: The Legal Inclusion of Diversity], Luigi Pellegrini, Cosenza, 2018.

[8] G. Dalla Torre, Il primato della coscienza. Laicità e libertà nell’esperienza giuridica contemporanea [The Primacy of Conscience], Studium, Rome, 1992; id., Dio e Cesare. Paradigmi cristiani nella modernità [God and Caesar], Città Nuova, Rome, 2008.