The Benedictine Order has a long history of involvement in interreligious dialogue. They see their calling in this area as a faithful response the Rule, Ch. 53, "On Hospitality," which asks monks to welcome all guests as if they were Christ.

Perhaps one of the first Benedictines to engage in interfaith dialogue was Peter the Venerable of Cluny (d. 1156), who traveled to Islamic Spain to commission the first Latin translation of the Qur'an. While Peter wrote polemical texts against Islam, he respected texts enough to realize the importance of studying the Qur'an, even if to argue against it. In the mid 1900s, some Benedictines living in India became involved in Hindu-Catholic dialogue, like Bede Griffiths and Henri Le Saux. Also inspired by Hindu-Catholic dialogues happening in India, a Benedictine nun, Sr. Pascaline Coff, founded a monastery for dialogue called Osage Forest of Peace in Oklahoma (now under lay leadership). Another monk, Thomas Merton, a Trappist (a different order, but still in the Benedictine orbit), became involved in Catholic-Buddhist dialogue in the 1960s. His abbey in Kentucky, Gethsemani, hosted several formal Buddhist-Benedictine monastic dialogues in the last thirty years. Their rich conversations about prayer, social justice, the afterlife, and more, were published in the book Gethsemani Encounter. Benedictines were also instrumental in founding the international organization for monastic interreligious dialogue, DIMMID. https://dimmid.org/ Finally, the Trappist monks of Tibhirine, recently beatified, were also proponents of grassroots Catholic-Muslim dialogue. The Tibhirine monks lived in peace with their Muslim neighbors in Algeria, serving them in a free medical clinic, and refusing to leave them during the violent civil war of the 1990s.

Our very own St. Procopius Abbey here in Lisle has also been involved in both interreligious and ecumenical (intra-Christian) dialogue; in fact, one of the reasons Dorothy Day wanted to become an oblate to our Abbey was because of its work in East-West Christian ecumenism in the 1950s. Fr. Julian Von Duerbeck and Br. Gregory Perron are two present-day monks who have been quite active in interreligious dialogue on the local, national, and international levels.
-Dr. Rita George-Tvrtkovic