Issuing the appeal on Feb. 23, he underlined that the invitation extended to “everyone, believers and non-believers alike.”
Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis has made building relations between Catholics and Muslims one of his top priorities. In 2019, he signed a landmark document on human fraternity with Ahmed el-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar.
On the day that he met with Hafiz, he marked the first anniversary of his historic trip to Iraq, during which he met with Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
The Grand Mosque of Paris, which opened in 1926, is the oldest mosque in Metropolitan France. Hafiz, a Franco-Algerian lawyer, has served as the mosque’s rector since January 2020.
A 2019 survey found that 48% of France’s 67 million population identified as Catholic, 4% as Muslim, and 1% as Jewish, with 34% describing themselves as having no religion. But other studies suggest the percentage of Muslims is higher.
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