Syrian Archbishop Receives John Paul II Prize, Says Hope for Peace Persists Despite Evil

October 22, 2025: For Syrian Archbishop Jacques Mourad of Homs, who was held captive by the Islamic State group for five months in 2015, being named recipient of the St. John Paul II Award was a reminder of the late pontiff’s dedication to peace and dialogue in challenging times.

In an interview with OSV News, Archbishop Mourad said St. John Paul’s experience of living through World War II gave him “well what war means, what evil, what suffering it causes.”

“For all of us who live in a time of war that has not ended for 14 years now, the teaching of St. Pope John Paul II is a very important reference point, above all,” he added.

Archbishop Mourad is set to receive the John Paul II Award at a ceremony at the Vatican on 18 October, according to the foundation.

Msgr. Pawel Ptasznik, head of the administrative council of the John Paul II Vatican Foundation, explained, “the award was created to promote those people and communities who carry out their activity inspired by the teaching and work” of the Polish pontiff.

Archbishop Mourad was selected by the foundation’s jury “almost unanimously, even though we had about 20 candidates,” said Msgr. Ptasznik.

“The situation in the Middle East in general, and the sufferings that the people have had to endure, made us think of Archbishop Mourad, who, on the one hand, is very committed to the issue of interreligious dialogue and, on the other hand, does so inspired by the teaching and the work of St. John Paul II,” he said.

“We chose Archbishop Mourad, who suffered for the dialogue between Christianity and Islam and did not stop,” Msgr. Ptasznik added. “He continues in this work, which is not easy.”

Before becoming Archbishop of Homs, Archbishop Mourad was part of Deir Mar Musa, a monastic community restored in the 1990s by Jesuit Father Paolo Dall’Oglio. Father Dall’Oglio was kidnapped in 2013 by Islamic State militants in Raqqa and presumed killed.

Calling the late Italian Jesuit a “champion of dialogue in Syria,” Archbishop Mourad told that the community’s charism “was always to work through hospitality, to build the path of dialogue of peace and coexistence.”

“I dedicated practically my entire monastic life to this charism, this path,” he said, noting the strong ties between Christians and Muslims when he served as rector of the Mar Elian Church in Qaryatain, Syria.

Many Muslims living near the church, he recalled, would come to pray before the relics of St. Elian, a third-century Syrian martyr, “because for them this saint is also a saint, a wali (holy person). So, they come to pray and to ask for a blessing.”

Those encounters, he continued, provided opportunities to meet and build friendships, particularly during the war, as he sought to assist the injured and those fleeing conflict.

Reflecting on his three-month captivity, Archbishop Mourad said he “truly understood that the path of dialogue sustained by prayer is the only road, the only way … to achieve this peace.”

“If I say I am a man of faith, it means I am a man of peace because we cannot put things against each other,” he told.

“This point is very important because today, with the way of the fanatical Muslims who practice violence in the name of God, they do not understand that this is not the God they worship; this is another God that they have constructed, that they have founded,” he explained.

“Because God — ‘the Merciful, the Clement,’ as we say in Arabic — is not a God who kills, who tortures. In fact, during my kidnapping experience, I confronted this because they truly changed their position only because I tried in a simple way to understand their violence, not to judge them. This is very important: not to judge one another.”

After the overthrow of former Syrian ruler Bashar Assad, ending his family’s 53-year rule, there were initial hopes of peace following the meeting in December 2024 between Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, and Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican leaders of the country.

However, Archbishop Mourad said the situation has not improved for Christians or the wider population.

“It’s the same thing, nothing has changed; concretely, it is like this,” he told. “We must not listen to the official speeches that the current government makes because it is not the reality that we live every day.”

“The violence, the corruption, the evil continues,” he lamented.

Source: OSV News