Since its foundation 40 years ago, the Sant' Egidio Community has focused on grassroots work to fight all forms of poverty, mediate interfaith dialogues, lobby for peace talks and address health-related issues.

Over the past four decades, the community has transformed friendship into a bridge between generations, while Europe and Italy have witnessed the progressive aging of populations and social problems related to immigration.

Recently, it put forward concrete proposals for creating an "art of cohabitation", involving European cities and immigrants from North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and other countries.

The community, which boasts 70,000 members in more than 75 countries, has intervened and facilitated reconciliation in a range of different backdrops, and successfully mediated humanitarian crises and contemporary conflicts from Mozambique to Burundi, from Guatemala to Liberia and the Ivory Coast.

The international conference on religious diversity in Indonesia it co-hosted last week was just part of its ongoing program to promote peace and human rights.

In his remarks at the conference, Sant' Egidio founder Prof. Andrea Riccardi said Indonesia would play a crucial role in establishing world peace, thanks to its cultural and ecological diversity.

"Thanks to Pancasila, Indonesia has no intention of become an Islamic state despite the fact that Muslims account for the majority of its population," he said.

"Along with Islam in India, Islam in Indonesia will play a global role in the future."

Indonesia, he added, constituted a living laboratory with more than 28 percent of its population aged below 15 years; and as a nation it had only just embraced plural democracy about 10 years ago.

"Indonesia is not heaven, of course, as plurality has forced its leaders to take acts of mediation that are complicated; but its people have shown that living together despite differences is not hell either," Riccardi said.

Relations between Sant' Egidio and Indonesia gained momentum when former president Abdurrahman Wahid visited the community's base in Rome and chose that symbolic place for his press conference during his tour of Italy in 2000.

A Sant' Egidio delegation last visited Jakarta in November 2008.