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Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, who served as prefect of the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue since 2019, passed away November 25, after a long illness. He was 72. A former missionary in Egypt and Sudan, he was one of the Vatican’s prominent figures in fostering interreligious dialogue, particularly with Islam. This dialogue became a priority for the Holy See after Pope Francis’s election in 2013, especially in regions where Catholics are a minority.
Ayuso Guixot began leading the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in 2016, the year of his episcopal ordination, as his predecessor, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, faced declining health. He officially assumed the role after Cardinal Tauran's death in 2018. Just a year later, on February 4, 2019, Pope Francis and Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, signed the landmark Document on Human Fraternity in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. This historic event was followed by several similar symbolic and diplomatic gestures, most recently in Jakarta, Indonesia, where Pope Francis met with the Imam of Asia’s largest mosque in September.
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"The world needs fraternity! Coming together to walk together is a way of overcoming this violence," Cardinal Ayuso Guixot said in an interview with La Croix in February 2020.
Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot was born in Seville, southern Spain, on June 17, 1952. At 21, while studying law, he was inspired by a magazine published by the Comboni Missionaries. Their spirituality centered on the Sacred Heart of Jesus—the theme of Pope Francis’s recent encyclical Dilexit nos—and their intercultural dialogue and presence in East Africa drew the young Sevillian to join the Italian-founded congregation in September 1973. He took perpetual vows and was ordained a priest in 1980. Soon after, he left Spain to study at the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI).
After earning his degree in 1982, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he became the parish priest for the Latin-rite community at Sacred Heart Church in Abbasiyya. Located near the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral and Al-Azhar University—both of which would later play significant roles in his Vatican career—the young priest focused on welcoming migrants and political refugees from neighboring Sudan. He was soon sent to Sudan to continue his mission.
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At the time, Sudan was embroiled in a civil war following the imposition of Sharia law by Gaafar Mohammed Nimeiry’s government and the division of the country’s south. From the late 1980s until 2002, Ayuso Guixot directed the catechetical center in the Diocese of El-Obeid, which included Darfur. He also taught Islamic studies in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, beginning in 1989.
In 2000, Ayuso Guixot earned a doctorate in dogmatic theology from the University of Granada, Spain. He continued teaching in Cairo and later at PISAI in Rome, becoming its rector in 2006. In 2007, he was appointed as a consultor to the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, led by Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran at the time.
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI promoted Ayuso Guixot to secretary of the council. Relations between the Holy See and Al-Azhar had significantly deteriorated following deadly attacks on Copts in Egypt, and the Vatican relied on the former missionary's interpersonal connections to rebuild ties with Cairo. Ayuso Guixot fulfilled this task and engaged in worldwide dialogue with Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Shintoists, and Confucianists.
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Was this dialogue naive, potentially exposing the Vatican to exploitation? This was among the questions raised in La Croix’s 2020 interview with Cardinal Ayuso Guixot. “I work with many dialogue partners, and that does not mean that I am 'playing their game,'” he explained. “The important thing is the will to dialogue. We do not sin by ingenuity. It is a question of gradually bringing dialogue into people's minds in order to establish relationships.”
A strong advocate for fraternal dialogue, Ayuso Guixot rejected any notion of relativism or efforts to create a "universal religion," but instead, "to open ourselves to the reality of others, while being rooted in our identity, to work for a better world."