The history of religious institutions teaches that political patronage does not nullify the spiritual scope of a place. Cathedrals have been built by princes. Mosques have been financed by sultans. Synagogues have been constructed under royal protection. This has not reduced them to instruments of propaganda. Over time, these places have developed a life of their own, a memory of their own, a transformative power of their own over those who frequent them.

The Abrahamic Family House seeks to carry this possibility.

The question is not whether this complex is sincere or strategic; it is probably both simultaneously. The question is under what conditions an institutionally constrained space of encounter can nonetheless become a place where human beings truly discover one another.

Let us begin again from the start. On October 27, 1986, John Paul II gathered one hundred and fifty religious representatives in Assisi. The formula was carefully chosen: not “to pray together,” which would have implied a liturgical fusion, but “to be together in order to pray.” Each tradition retains its own rites, its own invocations, its own relationship to the sacred. Copresence does not dissolve identity. It exposes it, without erasing it. It is this intuition that the Abrahamic Family House seeks to institutionalize. In 2019, Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, co-signed in Abu Dhabi the Document on Human........

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