Farewell to Cardinal Ayuso Guixot, a life between mission and dialogue
Merciful people do not die, because the good given in life survives. Fides Agency reports on the figure of Card. Ayuso Guixot
Rome (Fides Service)
Mission and dialogue. One could summarize with these two words the life of Spanish Cardinal Miguel Ángel Ayuso Guixot, who died at the age of 72 in recent hours at the Gemelli Hospital in Rome, where he had been hospitalized for some time for cancer.
His was a life dedicated to mission. Ayuso Guixot lived as a Comboni missionary in Egypt and Sudan was the first of the Congregation started by St. Daniel Comboni.
And after a long time dedicated to studying and weaving friendships with men and women of other faiths, in 2019 he was appointed to lead the Pontifical Council (now Dicastery) for Interreligious Dialogue.
A Dicastery he was very familiar with having been appointed, in 2007, as consultant to the same Pontifical Council. In that same year Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran was chosen as president.
Five years later Benedict XVI called Ayuso Guixot to succeed Archbishop Pier Luigi Celata in the post of secretary of the Dicastery.
At the end of the same year, with the establishment of the Vienna-based “King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue” (Kaiciid), he was counted as the Holy See’s representative to the Council of the Parties, also serving there as Founding Observer.
himself in the Vatican basilica.
And since then, it has been a succession of trips and engagements for Ayuso in every corner of the planet, including on the many papal flights that have taken the pontiff to nations where Christians are few and the majority belong to other faiths.
“The important thing is the willingness to dialogue. Let us not sin in naiveté. The issue is to gradually bring dialogue into people’s minds to establish relationships,” Ayuso had said in an interview with la Croix in 2020.
A vocation for dialogue, that of Cardinal Ayuso, which has produced many fruits especially with the Islamic communities.
It is also thanks to the work and drive given by his Dicastery that the Holy See managed to mend the rift with Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most authoritative academic-theological center of Sunni Islam.
That was the beginning of a path that will flow into the historic “Document on Human Fraternity” signed in Abu Dhabi in February 2019 by Pope Francis and Grand Imam Ahmed al Tayyeb.
The rapprochement between the Holy See and Al-Azhar was also due to the personal commitment of Ayuso Guixot, who flew to Egypt in February 2016 to deliver to the Grand Imam an invitation to visit the Vatican to meet with the Pontiff and thus, as Ayuso himself said in an interview with Fides given in those days, “to express the cordial desire to resume the relations of collaboration, which we for our part had never interrupted, and to recall the importance of our collaboration for the common good of the entire human family. We also carried an invitation for the Grand Imam to come to Rome to meet with Cardinal Jean Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, who will then accompany the Grand Imam to an official audience with Pope Francis. While there is no precipitation, we hope that this can happen soon.”
A few months later, Imam al Tayyeb flew to Rome and met with the Pope on May 23.The rest is history.
Cardinal Ayuso Guixots funeral will be held on Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 27, at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, at the Altar of the Chair.
The funeral, as is customary, will be presided over by the Dean of the College of Cardinals in the presence of the Pontiff who will preside only over the rite of Ultima Commendatio and Valedictio.
The cardinal’s remains will then be taken back to Spain, to Seville, the city where he was born and raised, to be buried in the family chapel.
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- Vatican News