CADENABBIA, Italy (CNS) -- Catholic and Muslim scholars and activists from Africa and Asia said a professed common obligation to love God and love one's neighbors must lead to common efforts to promote justice and human rights.

A commitment to loving one's neighbors "requires us to confront together the challenges which include poverty and illiteracy, environmental degradation and disease, human rights violations, gender discrimination and ethnic conflict," said participants at a Catholic-Muslim meeting in northern Italy Oct. 1-4.

Sponsored by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German political foundation, the meeting was designed to elicit the viewpoint of Catholic and Muslim scholars from Africa and Asia on "A Common Word," a dialogue initiative launched in 2007 by 138 Muslim scholars, mainly from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

The meeting was organized by Jesuit Father Christian Troll, a professor of Islam and of Muslim-Christian relations at the Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt, Germany.

The African and Asian scholars he gathered in Cadenabbia called the Common Word initiative "an important fresh impetus toward what we hope will be a new experience of Christian-Muslim relations."

Among other things, the initiative led Pope Benedict XVI to form the Catholic-Muslim Forum for dialogue. The initiative suggested a new round of dialogue focused on common Christian and Muslim teachings regarding the religious obligation to love God and love one's neighbors.

Participants in the Cadenabbia meeting said, "We wish to add to this discussion of love of God and neighbor a correlative emphasis on universal justice, on respect for the dignity of every human being, on freedom of conscience and respect for difference."

The participants from Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Ghana, Sudan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Germany, Australia and Great Britain said that in many of their countries Christians and Muslims live side by side, sometimes even within the same family, and that relations usually are harmonious.

"We have a wealth of experience of and are comfortable with multiple identities and belongings," they said.

At the same time, they said, Christian-Muslim tensions in other parts of the world can have a negative impact on their communities.

Exploring the notion of "neighbor," the participants said people cannot claim to love one another without trying to know, understand and empathize with one another. To promote that kind of understanding, educational materials must treat all religions fairly, religious leaders must be trained to respect others and promote dialogue, and the mass media must act responsibly when dealing with religion and religious communities.

Jesuit Father Daniel Madigan, an Australian and a professor at Georgetown University in Washington, said he and other participants discussed the challenges many people today face in seeing each other as neighbors and not as strangers or minorities.

Participants made a commitment to promoting "local, regional and global societies which can truly be experienced as neighborhoods in which all men and women are respected equally and accorded their full dignity as the noble creatures of God," their final statement said.

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