Heresy? The ravings of an old man? Or did the Pope have a point?

His Holiness the Pope has caused predictable outrage by suggesting, on his recent visit to Singapore, that “all religions are a path to God”. But is he entirely wrong?

Speaking to an audience of some 600 young people, the Pope asked where it would lead if people attack each other by claiming “my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t”. After all, he went on, “there’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God”.

One presumes that he was confining his thoughts to the world’s major religions, especially the Abrahamic religions, and not including, for example, the faith tradition of the Inca and Aztec peoples whose religion demanded the sacrifice of large numbers of innocent human beings.

He was confining himself, surely, to consideration of the major religions followed in Singapore. These comprise, principally, the Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh and Christian traditions, alongside that most numerous grouping of all, the “nones”.

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Yet while, at a stretch, the theistic religions might concur that there can, after all, only be one God, it is doubtful whether the largest minority, comprising Buddhists (at almost a third of Singapore’s population, nearly double the size of the Christian community), would find the claim tenable.

After all, Buddhism is explicit in its rejection both of a Creator and of the existence of a soul that stands in need of redemption. It is not at all clear, therefore, in what sense it could be said that Buddhism leads to God. It looks as though the Holy Father was either forgetting the Buddhist dogma of anatman, which means no-self or, more literally not-self, or that the Pope was thinking of God in terms of Truth.

This seems more likely. If you substitute the word Truth for God, then the Pope’s claim that all religions have “a language that leads to” Truth looks more plausible and more palatable both to (small ‘o’) orthodox Christians and to followers of the different major faith traditions.

We Catholics are told that Jesus, the Son of God, is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The Muslim is told that there is one God and Muhammed is his prophet. There are similar foundational truth-claims in each of the other religions.

But even substituting the word God for Truth is tricky for those wishing to uphold the traditional teaching of each faith tradition. The “Sheik, Muslim, Hindu,” and Buddhists whom the Holy Father was addressing would surely hold that their own faith taught them the Truth without remainder and would repudiate the Truth as taught by the Catholic church.

It looks as though the Pope cannot have meant what, at first glance, he was saying.

Are we to suppose, therefore, that the Holy Father was in error? Surely not. Given this, it is clearly up to us as Catholics to reconcile what, on the surface, seems dangerously close to heresy, with the plain fact that it is verging on the unthinkable that the Pope should teach falsely.

How might we go about this? We might begin by acknowledging the truth of the claim that there is only one God – or one Truth. We might further consider the Holy Father’s claim that there are different paths to that one Truth.

We would then have to set this against Jesus’s assertion that He, the second person of the Trinity, is the actual Truth. When we do so, we are compelled to acknowledge that, although the other religions may point in the right direction, they do not contain the fullness of that Truth. Further, anyone wishing to possess the Truth in its fullness must, perforce, assent to the teaching of the Catholic Church.

What is more, if we pursue the logics of the other religions and assess the conclusions they bring us to in the light of the Truth disclosed by revelation, we will see that this ultimate Truth is nowhere else to be found. Assuming this is what the Pope meant, then he was not wrong to say that each of the major religions is talking about the one God in their own language.

This, then, is surely how we must understand the Holy Father’s teaching in Singapore. We must not be content with a merely surface understanding of what he said. If his words were to be taken in this way, we have to write off what he said either as the ravings of an old man or as a deliberate lie, neither of which seem plausible.

That said, we might just wish that the Pope had been a little clearer that his words were not meant to be taken at face value – but at least he has been consistently clear on other important matters, such as how abortion entails the taking of innocent life.

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Photo: Pope Francis is greeted upon arriving for an interreligious dialogue with a youth group at the Catholic Junior College in Singapore, Singapore Island, 13 September 2024. Pope Francis embarked on a historic 12-day tour of Southeast Asia and Oceania, which took in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and Singapore. The 87-year-old pontiff aimed to promote interfaith dialogue and address issues like climate change during his longest trip yet as leader of the Catholic Church. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Getty Images.)

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