Rome, Aug. 24

Dear brother Carlos,

Thank you for your encouraging letter of welcome to our Journées Romaines Dominicaines meeting, and for your ongoing support of our ministry of dialogue with Islam.  The areas touched on in your letter were all topics of discussion at some point in our meeting, so your letter gave us a good start by tying together our different topics of conversation.

As you can well imagine, with about forty Dominicans present there were at least forty different opinions on most subjects; yet there was a shared commitment to finding more effective ways to dialogue with Muslims and to develop deeper ties with them. Together, this made for quite lively and fruitful exchanges. In the end, we have come up with some concrete answers to questions that were raised at the General Chapter of the Brothers in Krakow and mentioned in your letter. Outlines of our discussions can be found on the website for the meeting at http://theology.op.org/dialogue/jr2005/, and you can look there for our specific recommendations.

In addition to the creative ideas exchanged, the Journées Romaines was also a success as a meeting of the Dominican family. Brothers, sisters and laity were all present, sharing ideas as equals, learning from each other, praying and living together. Our different countries, situations, talents and perspectives brought richness to the discussions that a more homogenous group would have lacked, and thus the differences were embraced and put to good use. In the end we modeled well the dialogue we are trying to establish with people of other religions.

Thank you for your prayers as well, and you can be assured of ours.

God Bless +

The Sisters and Brothers participating in the Journées Romaines Dominicaines