Your eminences,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Dear friends,

At this first great meeting of the new century, the fifteenth since the historical day in Assisi in 1986, the organisers invite us to confirm their and maybe your convictions to know that �only the voice of dialogue is capable of building a future of a peaceful existence in all parts of the world�. We, the intended representatives of all religions and cultures, have the mission to prove the soundness of the convictions of the Community of Sant�Egidio which we love so well.

I personally think this meeting will be of much more interest if it poses a challenge to everyone of us, to all of us individually and to all of us together. It is obvious, indeed, that we will all be tempted to put forward the examples of the few places where dialogue has facilitated whatever negotiation. It is not less obvious that we are all going to express ourselves in favour of harmony and universal brotherhood, calling for peace on earth for all men of good will and the others.

It is still to be known, and here is the challenge, what we have been doing between two meetings, since Assisi and what we will be doing once back home after spending two days together. What we will be doing and what we can do.

Because everything happens as if, by the accumulation of the sadness of grieving and suffering, God had decided to be absent for his believers, and as if Progress had decided to disappear for the unbelievers.

Undoubtedly, history of humankind hasn�t been more than the history of wars where they fight one another. Undoubtedly again, merely no period in history was known where Evil, whose lay name is Violence, hasn�t intended to spread his reign. But today, the unity of the world is accomplished through the absence of unity in societies.

In these cases, two attitudes are possible : the first one consists in only concentrating on oneself, one�s group, one�s community. One is less anxious to discover than to remember. We only come close to those who rise in us complicities of memory or common preferences. In what is universal, one can only see a source of up-rooting, in the stranger a virtual enemy, and in the difference, heresy. One engages oneself, without knowing, in forces ready to provoke the so-called �clash of the civilisations�.

Whatever we may think of ourselves in this meeting, everyone ends up � unconsciously � behaving in this fatal way.

The second attitude consists of course in turning towards the Other with a mixture of this particular curiosity of intelligence and of this eager availability of the heart. This implies that one expects something from someone other than oneself or ones relatives. This supposes that one does not exclude a higher richness from the Other, even considering the needs he can have of us. This entails the esteemed idea of Emmanuel Levinas, the great metaphysician, that in the end, one can not exist without the Other whoever he may be. It is clearly the expression �whoever he may be� that is the most important here. IT MEANS THAT ONE IS MARCHING TOWARDS DIALOGUE. The clash of the civilisations is substituted instinctively or voluntarily by the complementary identities.

The Latin origin of the word dialogue is conversation. It is not the prophet�s interpellation, the chief�s commandment, the wise man�s monologue, the prayer of the believer, the mystical man�s ecstasy, nor the dictator�s law. For the dialogue to be doted with the virtues that we attribute to it, equality is necessary. It is necessary to create a situation of equality which is exceptional because it is against nature.

However, this situation is difficult, if not impossible, between the master and the servant, man and woman, the boss and the worker, the rich and the poor, the coloniser and the colonised. There should not be an attitude of tolerance either. It is a word that is at times noble and dangerous. Someone we tolerate is someone we put up with, someone we decide not to consider unbearable, someone we barely grant the right to existence or coexistence. We should not talk about tolerance, but acceptance. And that is not even enough ! Also and finally, it is compulsory that none of the partners in dialogue think they are the only ones to own the truth.

I could make you a list of all conversations, discussions and negotiations that have failed because the conditions I have named were not met. Today, this is the case for Tchetchenia, Timor, Sudan and of course for the Middle East.

But I prefer to remind to some and teach to others what I have recently learned myself, from what monks like the XIIth century Frenchman Pierre Ab�lard, like the XIIIth century Catalan adventurer Raymond Lullo, like the XVth century German visionary Nicolas de Cues have done with a prodigal freedom of spirit, the inventory of the conditions for dialogue.

These three monks - let us remember their names � share this surprisingly audacious idea: deciding beforehand, that dialogue does not make you change your mind, is undermining the conversation, thinking that God gave you a treasure he denied others in an undoubtedly very indirect way. This is a denial to those who believe to be part of the chosen.

It is important that these principles, that are at the same time true recipes, should be re-exhumed. Because at the beginning of this century, we have to reconcile at any price, the universality of values and the diversity of roots, the unity of civilisation and the difference of cultures. However, which arms are left to us to do it ?

Those of the Churches ? But we see men tearing each other into pieces in the name of the same Faith, the same Hope and the same Charity. The Churches balance between a faithfulness to their ethnic origins and an organisation of the rituals which entail a powerful will. We have the Democratic Ideal that since 1989 and the fall of the Berlin wall has been object of the world consensus, but which has still not succeeded to stop � still far from it - the excesses of the market economy which serves as a pillar for democracy.

We furthermore have a new empire which thinks to be charged with a providential mission because it is the most powerful. It tempts to embrace the idea that every obstacle to the economic health of the United States of America is an insult to a democracy that is blessed by God. It is more against the arrogance of this assumption rather than against the negative consequences of this assumption that the populations protest, giving birth again to an uprising of the South against the North. Denouncing the globalisation is bringing Americanisation to trial.

So, in this humility to which the problems of the world invite us, as well as our inability to solve them, I personally see nothing more than accepting like Sisyphus to roll his rock - or like Ezekiel and Saint John of the Cross to go back to the sources, to go back to the pre-ecclesiastical period. It is there where the Decalogue can be found, as well as the Sermon on the mountain, the incitement for the chosen to be only �priests and testimonies�, and the very comforting idea that at the end of times, God, the Absolute, Progress, Truth and Happiness can be found here and now, at any moment, when dialogue takes place, erasing boundaries, as our dear friend Mario Giro has strongly incited us to break.