On the morning of Monday, 11 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV received participants in the eighth joint colloquium organised by the Holy See’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue and Jordan’s Royal Institute for Inter-Faith Studies. The theme chosen for this year’s gathering was “Human Compassion and Empathy in Modern Times.” In his address — delivered in the Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace, the Pope called Christians and Muslims to a common mission: “to revive humanity where it has grown cold, to give voice to those who suffer and to transform indifference into solidarity.”

There are conversations that polite society prefers to defer, always hoping that the urgency will somehow resolve itself. This is no longer one of those conversations. Churches have been set ablaze. Synagogues have been firebombed. Sacred art has been desecrated. And across European and North American cities, the accumulated heritage of two thousand years of Christian civilisation — its music, its sculpture, its literature, its architecture — is increasingly subject to demands, pressures, and acts of hostility rooted in a theological framework that considers much of that heritage to be, quite literally, forbidden. The name of that framework is haram.

The debate provoked by the Open Iftar in Trafalgar Square has been, on the whole, a depressing spectacle. It has revealed a Christian community — or what remains of it in the British public square — that is more comfortable with reactive indignation than with the hard work of evangelical renewal. It has revealed politicians who invoke Christianity as a cultural marker while showing little evidence of any personal acquaintance with its actual content. It has revealed media commentators who can generate heat around questions of religious identity without shedding much light on what any of the faiths in question actually teach.

What it has not revealed — at least not prominently — is the Christianity we actually need. The Christianity of the Holy Week processions. The Christianity of the open door and the burning lamp. The Christianity of the priest who takes the gospel to the streets, not because he wishes to dominate anyone, but because he has been grasped by something he cannot keep to himself.