Leo XIV will not go to Assisi on October 27, but entrusts his message to the “spirit of Assisi”

The Holy See Press Office announced, on 23 October 2026, that Leo XIV will not travel to Assisi on 27 October for the interreligious meeting “Peace disarmed and disarming.” A follow-up chest X-ray confirmed “the excellent post-operative course” after the lung surgery he underwent on 13 October at the Gemelli polyclinic; but, “given the short time elapsed since the operation,” his attending physicians judged it prudent to advise against the helicopter journey planned for that day. The Pope will send a message to the organisers and to the representatives of the Christian confessions and the religions present, saying he is “convinced that the spirit of Assisi, dialogue, and the search for words and gestures of peace are precious resources in this time of conflicts.”

The meeting marks the fortieth anniversary of the World Day of Prayer for Peace convened at Assisi on 27 October 1986 by John Paul II, who then gathered a hundred and fifty leaders of a dozen religions: Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Shintoists, Jews, American Indians, animists, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Baha'is. The journey to Latin America, for its part, remains fixed from 6 to 17 November, his surgeons holding that no medical reason stands in its way. That a convalescent pope should follow his doctors' advice calls for no reservation: the care of the body God has entrusted to us is a form of prudence, and we wish the patient a full recovery. What the tradition measures is not the absence, but the inheritance the message comes to support.

What the Church has always taught

The first commandment governs the worship owed to God alone, and there is but one true God, one true faith, one acceptable worship. The Catechism of the Council of Trent, expounding this precept, teaches that the honour of religion is reserved to the one true God, and that to honour with the same movement the gods of the nations is the mark of idolatry, which Scripture condemns. From this proceeds the constant prohibition of prayer in common with cults foreign to the true faith.

Pius XI, in the encyclical “Mortalium animos” (1928), drew the consequence for assemblies where men of contrary beliefs gather to treat in common of the things of religion. He there reproves the opinion “that all religions are more or less good and praiseworthy,” for it leads little by little to indifferentism and to the ruin of the true religion; and he forbids Catholics to lend their support to such undertakings, which suppose all confessions equally acceptable. Charity, he says, is never separated from faith.

The measure

To desire peace is just, and to pray for it is a duty. But the peace the world promises is not the peace of Christ, and there is no true peace save in Him who said: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me” (Saint John, XIV, 6). The “spirit of Assisi” born in 1986 placed, in one same gathering convened for prayer, revealed religion and the cults that ignore or refuse it, as though they were parallel ways toward one same end.

This is precisely what the perennial Magisterium judged incompatible with the unity of the faith: not the wish for peace, but the setting of the religions on an equal footing in the religious act itself. We pronounce nothing upon the man nor upon his office; we measure the act and the spirit it invokes, and that spirit, in the light of the first commandment and of “Mortalium animos,” remains an ambiguity the tradition has never received.

What the faithful should hold from it

Let us pray for the recovery of the Sovereign Pontiff, and for the peace of the world, which is a real good. But let us hold firmly, without noise or rupture, to what the Church has always believed: there are not several ways of salvation set on the same rank, there is Christ and His Church. To pray for peace is to ask it of the one God who gives it, not to seek it in the concord of the cults. “There is no peace to the wicked, saith the Lord,” warns the prophet; true peace is received on one's knees before the true God, and nowhere else.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), exposition of the first commandment of the Decalogue; Pius XI, encyclical “Mortalium animos” (6 January 1928); Gospel according to Saint John, XIV, 6 (Douay-Rheims, Vulgate); Isaias, XLVIII, 22 (Douay-Rheims, Vulgate).