The French saying, Pas d'ennemi à gauche, can be paraphrased today: No dialogue with the right. For indeed, the “dialogue,” the most popular term of the sixties, is a companion-word of peaceful coexistence with communism and of apertura a sinistra, even of ecumenism whose noble objectives have been corrupted by the scramble of many, so-called ecumenists for the atheist's smile.

Primarily, then, “dialogue” is a political term, masking a strategy designed to appease and validate the ideological Left. Since this Left has its representatives within die Christian churches as well as in the political arena, it is hard to separate church matters from more generally political matters in discussing the dialogue. To a large extent, indeed, they overlap, as is shown by the identity of expressions that advocates of political or religious dialogue use in their parallel approach to the problem.