Rome Likens Jesus to Buddha: Pope Leo XIV Affirms Continuity on Interfaith Dialogue
New pontiff assures Jews that he will strengthen Catholic-Jewish dialogue in the spirit of Vatican II.
The Vatican is equating the teachings of Jesus with those of Buddha in its first interfaith message since Pope Leo XIV’s election, signaling the pontiff’s desire for continuity with the dialogical approach of Vatican II and Pope Francis to the world religions.
The pope’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue sent its greetings to Buddhists on the occasion of the festival of Vesak on Monday, likening the message of Jesus in John’s gospel with the teaching of the Buddha in the Dhammapada — an anthology of teachings in the Buddhist canon.
“The Buddha taught that, ‘he who is free from craving and attachment is perfect in uncovering the true meaning of the Teaching, and knows the arrangement of the sacred texts in correct sequence — he indeed is the bearer of his final body,’” the Vatican noted.
“He is truly called the profoundly wise one, the great man” (Dhammapada, Ch. 24, V. 352),” the document, titled “Buddhists and Christians in Liberating Dialogue for Our Time,” stated, marking the “sacred festival” commemorating the Buddha’s birth and enlightenment.
“For Jesus, knowledge of Truth is liberating: ‘You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’ (John 8:32),” Cardinal Jacob Koovakad, the dicastery’s prefect who cosigned the document, wrote in his comparison of the Son of God with the prince who founded Buddhism.
Buddhism Offers “True Liberation”
Koovakad, a Syro-Malabar priest who was raised to the cardinalate by Pope Francis in December 2024, said, “This yearning for true liberation finds deep resonance in our shared pursuit of truth and fullness of life, and it aligns with the teachings of our respective traditions.”
The Vatican’s endorsement of Buddhism as one of the paths of “true liberation” echoes the sentiments of Pope Leo XIV, who shared a post on the Buddha’s teachings from Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi in 2014. The post, in Italian, quoted the Buddha as saying: “Life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived.”
Koovakad’s message also echoes the final statement of the Seventh Buddhist-Christian Colloquium on “Karuna and Agape in Dialogue for Healing a Wounded Humanity and the Earth,” which involved the Holy See and the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Thailand and put Jesus on the same plane as the Buddha concerning redemption and healing.
“As Buddhists and Christians, we see the Buddha and Jesus as Great Healers. The Buddha pointed to greed and Jesus to sin as the cause of suffering,” the colloquium declared. “On many levels, Jesus and the Buddha proposed love and compassion as medicine to drive out the darkness in the human heart and the world.”
“For those of us who work in Buddhism, the Vatican releasing that document also speaks volumes! Really happy where this is headed,” tweeted Tyler McNabb, a Catholic associate professor of philosophy at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania.
Great Healers, Hopeless, or Heresy?
In comments to The Stream, the Rev. Dr. Rohintan Mody, who converted to Christianity from his background in Zoroastrianism and is author of the book Empty and Evil: The Worship of Other Faiths in 1 Corinthians 8-10 and Today, noted that the new document “compares both Buddha and Jesus as two great healers with the same solution: love and compassion.”
“Yet it leaves the big question unanswered: the existence, nature, and identity of God,” he said. “Even if you want to do interfaith dialogue you have to start with God, not anthropology. The wrong starting place means the wrong answer. It is prima facie heresy.”
Dr. Paul Williams, a former Buddhist who is emeritus professor of Indian and Tibetan Philosophy at the University of Bristol, agrees. “If the Buddhist position is correct, our death in this life is actually, really, the death of us. Death will be the end for us,” he writes.
“I began to see that if Buddhism were correct then unless I attained enlightenment (nirvana) or something like it in this life, where the whole cycle of rebirth would finally come to a complete end, I would have no hope. Each one of us — the person we are — is lost forever. Buddhism for me was hope-less.”
Open-Minded Augustinian Pontiff
The message from the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue signals continuity with the religious inclusiveness heralded by the Second Vatican Council and the extraordinary strides Pope Francis made in interreligious dialogue during the 12 years of his pontificate.
When asked if Leo XIV would follow Francis’s lead when it comes to interfaith dialogue, Dr. Craig Considine, Islamic scholar and senior lecturer in the department of sociology at Rice University, told ABC News, “I think we’re going to see a continuation of Pope Francis’s approach.
“When he was at the Chicago seminary, one of his professors was a leading Jewish scholar on Jewish-Catholic relations, and I would surmise that this professor had a big impact on Pope Leo,” Considine observed. “I think that one of the big reasons why Pope Francis was so beloved was that he wasn’t trying to force-feed Catholicism on anyone.”
Pope Leo’s professor at CTU, Fr. John T. Pawlikowski, told The Jewish Chronicle: “My experience of him was he’s a very open-minded person who’s very much in the context of Vatican II.”
“Being an Augustinian means being pretty open,” explained Fr. Alejandro Moral Antón, the prior general of the Augustinian order to which Leo XIV belongs. Compared to other orders, theirs does not have “very rigid norms.”
Leo Praised for Inclusive Approach
Leo XIV’s alma mater, the Catholic Theological Union, is known for its interfaith emphasis, including courses on Catholic-Jewish and Catholic-Muslim studies. In 2020, CTU appointed a Muslim scholar, Prof. Syed Atif Rizwan, as the director of its Catholic-Muslim Studies Program.
On May 8, the day he was elected, Leo XIV wrote to the American Jewish Committee’s Director of Interreligious Affairs, Rabbi Noam Marans, pledging “to continue to strengthen the Church’s dialogue with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate.”
Marans’s response was warm. “We are deeply moved that Pope Leo XIV, so early in his papacy, has reaffirmed his commitment to Catholic-Jewish relations,” he wrote. “As we approach the 60th anniversary of this landmark declaration, we look forward to working together to deepen understanding and cooperation.”
“Complete Commitment” to Vatican II
In his first papal address, Leo XIV issued a call to dialogue: “Help us as well — help one another — to build bridges through dialogue, through encounter, uniting everyone to be one single people always in peace.”
Over the course of his first week in office, Leo XIV has repeatedly emphasized his desire to pursue continuity rather than rupture with the new magisterium of Vatican II and Pope Francis.
“I would like us to renew together today our complete commitment to the path that the universal church has now followed for decades in the wake of the Second Vatican Council,” he told the College of Cardinals on May 10. “Pope Francis masterfully and concretely set it forth in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.”
Conservative Catholics reacted negatively to this inclusive approach. When asked how he would respond to the new pontiff’s “complete commitment” to Vatican II, Bishop Athanasius Schneider, a leading voice in the traditionalist movement, said: “I think a pope should not speak so because our first complete commitment is to Jesus Christ’s gospel.”
The prelate stressed that Leo XIV’s first task must be to correct issues that are “disfigured” or “confused” in the life of the Church, beginning with “the truth about the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only way to salvation and that other religions are not means of grace or means or ways of salvation.”
The Smiling Buddha and the Crucified Christ
In his Credo: A Compendium of the Catholic Faith, Schneider notes that some of the affirmations of the Second Vatican Council “are in themselves ambiguous and can lead to an erroneous understanding.” The bishop writes that Catholics may “propose emendations or corrections of evidently ambiguous or erroneous statements or commands of a pope or ecumenical council.”
“Is Buddhism a means to supreme illumination and liberation from evil?” Schneider asks, citing Vatican II’s endorsement of that religion. “No. Buddhism rejects the Incarnation and Redemption, proposing instead a path of self-extinction through meditation techniques. Such a path is contrary to God’s plan for divine union with man in Christ, culminating in the illumination of the Beatific Vision in heaven.”
Koovakad, by contrast, cites Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate: Buddhism “proposes a way of life by which people can, with confidence and trust, attain a state of perfect liberation and reach supreme illumination either through their own efforts or with divine help.”
“Where is the basic difference between Jesus and the Buddha to be found?” theologian Hans Küng asks in his book Christianity and the World Religions. “We can bring it into sharp focus by holding side by side the figure of the smiling Buddha, seated on a lotus blossom, and that of the suffering Jesus, nailed to the cross.
“Christian faith is convinced, this Crucified One did not fall into nothingness [as in the teaching of Buddhism], but was taken up out of this temporary, fleeting, inconstant reality into the true, eternal life.”
AUTHOR
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral. This article has been cross-posted with the author’s permission from The Stream.
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