In 1998, a quiet Jesuit theologian named Jacques Dupuis was summoned to Rome. His recent book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism had stirred both admiration and alarm.
Dupuis had proposed that the world’s many faiths might not simply be treated as tolerated anomalies or faint echoes of Christianity. Instead, he suggested they could be living spaces where God’s spirit is already at work. For this he was investigated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led then by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
Dupuis’s ordeal, while painful, also illuminated challenges in interreligious theology. His fidelity to the church was never in doubt—he affirmed again and again that Christ is the unique mediator of salvation—but he insisted that divine truth could radiate through other traditions in ways not reducible to Christianity’s categories. “The mystery of Christ,” he wrote, “is larger than the Christian world.”
That controversy, still echoing in classrooms and chancery corridors, points to an ongoing lesson: The church continues to learn to look through the window opened 60 years ago by the church’s “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions” (“Nostra Aetate”), issued at the Second Vatican Council. The declaration, just 1,600 words long, marked one of the most radical turns in Catholic history: a shift from suspicion to encounter, from a closed fortress to an open horizon.
The Promise of a New View
When the bishops of Vatican II promulgated “Nostra Aetate” in October 1965, they were concluding an age of defensiveness. For centuries, the maxim extra ecclesiam nulla salus—“no salvation outside the church”—had often been interpreted narrowly. Many believed God’s grace operated almost exclusively through explicit Christian faith and sacramental life. Other religions were seen as well-intentioned errors, shadows rather than lights. However, in the spirit of doctrinal continuity, the council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church” (“Lumen Gentium”}, reaffirmed that while the church remains the ordinary means of salvation, God’s grace is not confined and can extend beyond the visible bounds of the church, thus broadening the understanding of salvation without negating its traditional roots.
“Nostra Aetate” quietly dismantled the church’s posture of defensiveness. Its opening paragraph named something breathtakingly simple yet revolutionary: “Men expect from the various religions answers to the unsolved riddles of the human condition.” Suddenly, non-Christian faiths were not seen merely as obstacles. Instead, they became partners in the same human quest for meaning. The document went on to praise the “moral and spiritual truths” of Hinduism and Buddhism, to recognize in Islam those who “adore the one God” and, most movingly, to repudiate antisemitism “at any time and from any source.”
The church had not altered a dogma; it had changed its posture. This was a conversion of gaze—a theological re-education of the heart.
Grace as the Human Horizon
Behind this shift stood the quiet genius of another Jesuit, Karl Rahner. While the council fathers drafted declarations, Rahner was building the metaphysical scaffolding that made them thinkable. He asked: How can the church affirm both the uniqueness of Christ and the real possibility of salvation for those who never know him by name?
Rahner’s answer was what he called the “supernatural existential.” The phrase may sound forbidding. Its meaning, though, is profoundly consoling. Every human being, Rahner argued, lives within an atmosphere of grace—an invisible, sustaining relationship with God that is not occasional but structural. Grace is not a spiritual “bonus” added to human nature. It is the horizon of our existence, the air we breathe.
To express this, Rahner borrowed language from the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger had spoken of Dasein, the human being as the one for whom Being itself is a question. We are thrown into a world not of our choosing. Still, we are always reaching beyond it and asking why anything exists at all.
Rahner baptized this insight. Our innate longing for truth and love, he said, is not empty curiosity. It is already God’s invitation. The capacity to know and to love is graced from within.
Hence, when the Gospel is preached, we are not hearing a message alien to us; we are recognizing the voice that has already whispered in our hearts. As Rahner put it, God’s self-communication is “an abiding determination of [humanity’s] transcendental constitution.”
In biblical terms, this is what John’s prologue means when it calls Christ “the true light that enlightens everyone.” The light shines not only on but through every person. Grace is not an external beam occasionally switched on. It is the dawn built into the human soul.
This idea underwrites the open scope of “Nostra Aetate.” If every person is already touched by the offer of divine life, then dialogue with other religions is not a negotiation between insiders and outsiders. It is a mutual recognition of grace at work in different histories, languages and rituals, a shared search for the mystery that has already found us.
Dupuis and the Courage to Go Further
Jacques Dupuis took Rahner’s insight and extended it into a new era of global Catholicism. Living in India for decades, he taught at the Jesuit theologate in Delhi. There Dupuis encountered Hinduism and Islam not as abstract systems but as living spiritual worlds. In their scriptures and mysticism, he saw genuine responses to the same divine mystery Christians encounter in Christ.
In Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (1997), Dupuis proposed that other religions might participate positively in God’s plan, not merely as preparatory stages or reflections of Christianity, but as real, divinely willed paths of encounter with the transcendent. He was not proposing relativism but a deeper Christology: Christ as the universal sacrament of salvation whose mystery overflows the visible boundaries of the church.
The book was a milestone—and a lightning rod. In 2001 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification that warned that some of Dupuis’s formulations risked suggesting “two parallel economies of salvation.” Dupuis was asked to affirm that Christ remains the sole and universal mediator, which he readily did. Yet the episode exposed lingering anxiety within the church about the limits of openness.
The integrity showed by Dupuis during the investigation—his patience, humility and fidelity—made him a quiet martyr for the theology of dialogue. He never sought to replace Christ with pluralism; he sought to understand how the cosmic Christ might be encountered beyond the church’s institutional frontiers. In doing so, he carried forward the unfinished work of “Nostra Aetate.”
If Rahner gave us the metaphysical foundation for interreligious respect, Dupuis gave us its ecclesial imagination. He asked not only how grace operates in individuals, but how God’s self-communication might take communal, cultural form within the world’s great religious traditions.
From Theory to Living Encounter
“Nostra Aetate” was never meant to remain only an idea. Theologians may parse its implications, but its true field of proof is lived experience. The decades since 1965 have shown both its fruit and its fragility.
On one side, Catholic-Muslim and Catholic-Jewish dialogues have flourished. Papal visits to synagogues and mosques have become ordinary signs of friendship. On the other hand, the temptation to retreat into suspicion remains strong. A concrete example of lingering anxiety can be seen in the reactions to the “Document on Human Fraternity” signed in Abu Dhabi in 2019 by Pope Francis and the grand imam of Al-Azhar. While celebrated as a milestone for interfaith harmony, it also stirred controversy among those who feared it blurred theological boundaries.
Meanwhile, some drew stark contrasts between this event and the optimistic confidence of “Nostra Aetate,” revealing the church’s ongoing journey toward embracing and understanding diverse faith traditions.
Even within the church, dialogue can sound like weakness to some Catholics who fear that affirming truth in other religions dilutes Christ’s uniqueness. Yet Rahner and Dupuis show the opposite is true. We affirm Christ’s uniqueness precisely because we believe his grace is inexhaustible. The light is so universal that it cannot be contained by our categories.
Rahner’s “supernatural existential” also helps us read the church’s wounds. The clerical abuse crisis has exposed the illusion that holiness is guaranteed by institutional belonging. Grace, Rahner reminds us, is not an automatic property of office or structure. It is the silent work of God in the depths of human freedom. If the Spirit can be active in a Buddhist monk or a Muslim mystic, then surely it can also be at work in the survivor who demands truth. It can be present in the lay faithful who rebuild trust from below.
Dupuis might say that the Holy Spirit’s “interreligious” presence is mirrored by its “intra-ecclesial” one: The same God who speaks in other traditions speaks also through the margins of our own. The call of “Nostra Aetate” is not only to dialogue outward but also to listen inward—to the unfamiliar voices within the body of Christ that reveal where grace is moving next.
A Mature Faith: ‘Releasement’ and Trust
In this moment, many Catholics feel disoriented by change. The insights of Rahner and Dupuis summon a deeper kind of faith, one less about possession, more about trust. Rahner often cited the mystic Meister Eckhart’s term Gelassenheit, “releasement.” Faith, he suggested, is not clinging to certainty. It is standing open to God’s unforeseeable self-gift.
Applied to interreligious dialogue, this means letting go of the need to define God’s presence in advance. The encounter between religions becomes not just a polite academic exchange but a shared exposure to the divine mystery that always exceeds our language. The Christian does not enter dialogue as one who owns the truth. Instead, one trusts that truth is already at work in the other.
I experienced this firsthand during a discussion with a practitioner of Buddhism. As we talked about our spiritual journeys, I was confronted with a perspective that challenged my own certainties. The profound sense of peace and acceptance this individual embodied was a living testament to grace, prompting me to release my preconceived notions and embrace a deeper, shared search for the divine.
This is the spiritual heart of “Nostra Aetate.” It was never a manifesto of relativism, but a confession of faith in the universality of grace. The document asked the church to move from mere tolerance to what Pope Francis would later call “a culture of encounter,” a readiness to be changed by meeting the other.
Philosophically, Rahner gave us the reason such openness is possible: because grace is not a discrete gift or a process or reception but the condition of our very being. Theologically, Dupuis gave us its consequence: the Spirit’s freedom to work where it wills, even beyond our maps. Together they form a kind of dialectic of hope—Rahner’s depth providing the ground, Dupuis’s vision providing the horizon.
The Still-Open Window
Sixty years after “Nostra Aetate,” the church again finds itself at a crossroads. The Synod on Synodality speaks of listening, inclusion, discernment. These are not bureaucratic words; they are theological ones. They echo the same conversion that began in 1965: from control to communion, from rigidity to relationship.
But every generation must decide whether to keep that window open. To do so is to accept vulnerability, the risk that dialogue will unsettle our tidy boundaries, that grace will appear where we least expect it. Yet perhaps that is precisely what faith demands.
The God whom Rahner described as “absolute Mystery” and whom Dupuis found shimmering in the faiths of the world is not a possession to be defended, but a presence to be discovered. When the church dares to look through the window of “Nostra Aetate,” it does not lose its identity; it discovers its depth.
We stand, as Meister Eckhart said, “bareheaded beneath God’s thunderstorms,” and we are bathed in light. The window that was opened in 1965 is still ajar. Our task is to keep looking through it—toward a world radiant with grace, where dialogue itself becomes a form of prayer, and where the Spirit’s breath, still blowing through that conciliar room, teaches the church anew how to see.
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