This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Pope Paul VI created the office now called the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue before the Second Vatican Council had even decided what it would say about other religions. He established the Secretariat for Non-Christians in 1964, while the Council was still in session, a year ahead of the Council's own declaration Nostra Aetate, which would go on to reset Catholic teaching about Judaism and Islam. The Secretariat existed, in other words, before the theology it would spend the following decades implementing had been finished being written. In 1974 it grew a dedicated Commission for Religious Relations with Muslims, giving the Church's largest single interreligious relationship its own standing structure inside the office.
The name changed twice more as the Church's sense of the office's standing changed with it. In 1988, John Paul II's reorganization of the Roman Curia, the apostolic constitution Pastor Bonus, renamed it the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, replacing a name defined by what the world's religions were not, non-Christian, with one defined by what the office actually did. It carried that name for over three decades until Pope Francis's 2022 curial reform, Praedicate Evangelium, renamed it once more, to the Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue, the name it holds today.