In March of 2019, during an inflight press conference on his way back to Rome from an apostolic visit to Morocco, the pope echoed his 2016 admonition that “a person who thinks only about building walls...and not building bridges, is not Christian” when he said that those who opt for building walls rather than bridges “will end up imprisoned by the walls they have built.”

A little over a year later, in Fratelli tutti (2020)—the first papal encyclical in recorded history to have been inspired by a friendship between a pope and a prominent Muslim religious leader - Francis warns us of the dangers of “certain ancestral fears” that “have been able to hide and spread behind new technologies. ... As a result,” he writes, “new walls are erected for self-preservation, the outside world ceases to exist and leaves only ‘my’ world, to the point that others, no longer considered human beings possessed of an inalienable dignity, become only ‘them.’”

The guiding spirit of the Bridge Initiative is to pursue a peace rooted in the inviolable dignity of every human person. The Initiative's aim is to disseminate original and accessible research that informs the general public about Islamophobia.

(Image Credit: L’Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP)