It is true that JP2 was a champion of interfaith dialogue. I personally don’t think everything he did in this regard was necessarily prudent.
However, as with Pius XII and the Nazis, a lot of what he said and did has been taken sadly out of context and exaggerated by his critics.
Certainly I know of no such event taking place in St Peters. What your friend may be thinking of was the Assisi Peace Conference in 1986. I don’t know nearly enough about what went on there to comment, and I doubt your friend does either.
I do know that for centuries the Church’s policy has been dialogue with, rather than simple rejection of, those of other faiths.
Even the Council at Trent in the 16th century freely invited Martin Luther and other representatives of the Protestant cause to attend. It even granted them a safe conduct to come to the Council. The only reason they did not actually attend was that the Holy Roman Emperor refused to guarantee their safe passage through his territories, and so it would’ve been too dangerous.
And there’s good precedent for this. Even in scripture, St Paul is recorded praising the people of Athens for their piety, and cleverly using their own worship practices - in the form of their worship of an ‘unknown God’ who he declared to be his one true God - to build on the commonalities between them.
The saint didn’t, as a lot of JP2’s critics prefer he would’ve done with those of other faiths, condemn them vitriolically, demand they tear down all their pagan temples etc etc.
They would, it seems, have the Pope become a second St Peter, piously but wrongly refusing to eat (and doubtless worship) with Gentile converts because they weren’t practicing the Christian faith in its perfection as he understood it, not obeying the Jewish law which he thought still stood.
And Peter was rightly condemned for this by Paul - and from a higher power in the vision at Cornelius’ house, which he rightly took to mean he was required to accept the different, ‘imperfect’ Gentiles.
