When Pope Leo XIV visited the Great Mosque of Algiers on 13 April, he entered a Muslim place of worship not to dilute his own faith or to stage an easy performance of tolerance but to affirm a harder truth: that people who believe differently can still choose to live together in peace.

In his remarks, he spoke of peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, and what God truly wills for creation. For many of us in the Philippines, that image should feel familiar.

Our national story has long included difficult, imperfect, but real attempts to live across religious differences without reducing one another to caricature. This is why the advocacy behind the United Muslim Democrats of the Philippines — and the broader coalition once carried by the National Union of Christian Democrats and the United Muslim Democrats of the Philippines — feels relevant again.

More than the acronyms, what mattered was the intent behind them: the belief that Christians and Muslims in this country can meet not only in suspicion or transaction but in shared democratic purpose.

It is worth recalling figures such as former Senator Raul Manglapus and Amado Luis Lagdameo, who helped give language and weight to that wider Christian-Muslim democratic imagination. A 1991 volume edited by Lagdameo stands as one marker that this was not an improvised slogan but a real civic project.

That intent deserves a second look today. For all our new technology and slogans, the times have not changed where it matters most. We are still confronted by the same test. Can we live together without demanding sameness? Can we find common ground without pretending our differences do not exist?

The real legacy of those earlier efforts was civic and moral. They pointed to a larger discipline: how to build a nation in which difference is not erased, but neither is it allowed to become the whole story.

The Bishops-Ulama Conference offers a concrete Philippine example. It has long stood as one of the clearest reminders that peaceful coexistence is not sustained by sentiment alone. It requires relationships, dialogue, moral leadership and institutions willing to keep showing up.

The Philippine experience is not a finished model. We have had our share of violence, prejudice, neglect, and failure. But we have also built spaces and habits that suggest coexistence here is not a fantasy. It is a practice. Hard won, unevenly kept, but real.

This is why the moment also places something constructive before the present leadership.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., like any leader under pressure, has in such moments a chance not only to show steadiness and maturity, but to help the Philippines say something meaningful to the wider world: that we are here, that we have our own experience of living across differences, and that we remain willing to do the hard work of coexistence.

Leadership is not measured only in calm weather. In harder moments, a leader has the chance to mature into something larger than his critics or supporters expected. There is room here for a steadier kind of statesmanship, one that recognizes that interfaith respect is not only morally sound, but politically wise.

One hopes that His Holiness Pope Leo might one day visit the Philippines and see for himself that beyond the acronyms and beyond the noise that often overtakes public life, there have long been Filipinos trying, in their own imperfect but meaningful ways, to build habits of mutual regard, peaceful coexistence and shared nationhood.

The journey is far from over. Still, it is fair to say with some pride that the Philippine experience may yet offer the rest of the world a measure of inspiration, not because we have perfected coexistence, but because we have continued to pursue it.