Vatican City (AsiaNews) – While necessary, "integration with people of other cultures and religions is never with its difficulties and unknown factors. This is especially true in the case of Muslim immigrants who pose specific problems," the pope said today at a plenary assembly for the Pontifical Council of Pastoral Care for Migrants and Itinerant People.

The pope recommended that the Church should welcome such peoples openly "by fostering an ever more generous evangelic witness in Christians so that they overcome their prejudices."  The pope said that this is accomplished "above all by educating faithful that even they can become ad gentes missionaries on earth." 

"The processes of modernization," said the pope, "not only call the Church to cross-cultural dialog, but even among various religions. Indeed humanity in the third millennium urgently needs to find common spiritual values on which to build a society worthy of man."

According to John Paul II, "fraternal dialog and reciprocal respect will never represent a limit or impediment to the spreading the Gospel. Love and acceptance are, rather, in themselves the first and most efficacious ways of evangelizing."

The pope stressed that the word "dialog" should accompany the term "globalization", which "more than any other signifies daily evolution in history." Dialog, he said, "must characterize one's very attitude, both mentally and pastorally, in that we are all called to have in view of (maintaining) a new world balance."

"The consistent number of 200 million migrants (each year) makes this even more urgent," he said.   

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