Bianchi, Enzo

founder and prior of the monastic community of Bose

The talk is followed by questions from unnamed audience members, including an organiser of the festival. The closing announcement by Radio Radicale mentions that the reporter Letizia Leviti also took part in the event.

Enzo Bianchi — Il dialogo interreligioso

Andrea Cirla · Sep 4, 2026 · partial coverage

• Enzo Bianchi
• interreligious dialogue
• Mediterranean
• Judaism
• Islam
• Christianity
• Vatican II
• anti-Judaism
• John Paul II
• Bose

Coverage note: full - automatic transcript machine-translated into English from an Italian lecture. The end of the file contains unrelated Radio Radicale programming.

Core ideas

Enzo Bianchi notes that "interreligious dialogue" is a recent expression and that most believers are still in the "Stone Age" on the subject. He limits himself to the Mediterranean and the three monotheisms born on its shores. Israel affirms a God who is not only unique but "one" (Adonai echad), and the election of a people creates a logic of exclusion. The prophets alternate this with a dream of universal reconciliation, such as Isaiah's road joining Egypt, Israel and Assyria. After the Babylonian exile, the crisis drives Israel back to identity, even to the "purity of the race" and the expulsion of foreign wives, which Bianchi sees as the origin of the Samaritan schism. After the year 70 only two "twins" remain, Pharisaic Judaism and Christian Judaism, not father and son nor elder and younger brothers. They split in the 90s, and once Christians are in power their theological anti-Judaism turns into persecution: Ambrose calls the burnt synagogue of Callinicum a "brothel". Islam then appears as a theological "enigma", a third revelation and a missionary rival. Some eastern Christians welcomed it as a liberation, and Muslim Spain knew real exchange, but the Crusades, the Reconquista and Lepanto turned the Mediterranean into a clash of monotheisms.

Speaking "as a Christian", Bianchi argues that the Gospel ("love your enemies") excludes any service of truth through violence. He recalls that the early apologists recognised a logos spermatikos, seeds of the Word, and the action of the Spirit in every culture, since every human being bears the image of God. It was "Christianity in power", not the Gospel, that produced exclusion, from Unam Sanctam (1302) to the Council of Florence (1442), which denied salvation to anyone outside the Catholic Church. Vatican II, driven by John XXIII, reversed this: whoever seeks the good according to conscience can be saved. Relations with Jews have been transformed. The "perfidious Jews" prayer was sung until 1958, and John Paul II declared in Mainz in 1982 that the covenant with Israel was never revoked, which Bianchi says he witnessed from close by. Remaining tensions are political. Dialogue with Islam is harder because the Muslim world, in his view, has not gone through Enlightenment secularism. He nevertheless reminds his audience that cloistered nuns wore veils like a burqa until 1982, and defends Benedict XVI's Regensburg question about faith, reason and violence.

He proposes an ethic of dialogue: silence one's prejudices, as Massignon, Charles de Foucauld and the monks of Tibhirine did; let others tell their own story; and choose to see the other as a gift rather than as Sartre's "hell". Christianity itself is plural, and dialogue happens concretely, as with the Turin lady who discovered in a hospital ward that her Tunisian neighbour was "like us". In the discussion Bianchi agrees, citing Cardinal Martini, that God is too great to be called Catholic, and quotes Matthew 25 and Augustine: some who are outside are inside. He concedes to a hostile questioner that monotheisms have bred violence, but compares polygamy to Solomon and David and wife-beating to the Italian countryside of his youth. He calls for humanisation, rights and reason, and says immigration is necessary provided newcomers respect democratic law. He attributes the Church's turn towards Judaism less to intellectual movements than to personal history, Roncalli in Turkey during the Shoah and the Polish experience of John Paul II. On women, he admits it is the most evaded question in the Church and points only to monasticism, where an abbess equals an abbot.

Excerpts