It is with pleasure that we have received Your Excellency's visit, which permits us, after a period of a little over a year, to exchange once again ideas and points of view, in the same atmosphere of frank cordiality which had marked the visit of Your Excellency to us in the month of February last year.

On that occasion, we expressed our appreciation of the high regard which Your Excellency manifested, towards spiritual and religious values, while the sincere desire of a hopeful and loyal dialogue was mutually confirmed. Today we can note with satisfaction that such sentiments have begun to produce positive results: the relations of mutual comprehension have become more concrete, and the Catholic Church, by sending religious personnel for assistance in hospitals, has been able to widen even more her collaboration towards the progress, the development and the well-being of the Libyan Nation. In this manner, the religious nuns, who generously fulfil this mission of help to the suffering sick, are at the same lime eloquent witnesses of the spirit of fraternity which animates Christians towards Muslims and towards all men.

The questions regarding the situation in the Middle East are vividly present to us, as you have been able to see. We wish to renew, at the end of this meeting and knowing well the difficulties which at this moment stand in the way of peace, our desire that all the parties concerned make every effort to achieve – through loyal negotiations – just and abiding solutions, which should not neglect the religious and spiritual aspect of the problem.

*L’Osservatore Romano, 1.5.1975, p. 1;

ORa n° 19 p. 3.