A bit more commentary on Monday’s meeting with Muslim leaders, all courtesy of Papa Ratzinger Forum:

Photo thread here. Also found on that thread are photos of a very happy religious sister from yesterday’s General Audience.

From Avvenire, the newspaper of the Italian bishops:

All the Muslim representatives agreed that the meeting with the Pope had been fruitful. Their statements all had the same positive tone.

"The meeting," said Abdellah Redouane, secretary-general of the Islamic Center of Rome, "went very well. It was an important step forward after the series of clarifications that followed the Pope’s lecture in Regensburg. We have gone beyond the tensions of the past several days, and now we should intensify our efforts to favor ongoing dialog. It is important for world peace."

Klalid Chaouki spoke for the Consultative Council for Italian Muslims: "Benedict XVI was very clear in stating the need for dialog, and we invite the Muslim world to welcome his words of great esteem and recognition, and pursue the course he suggests."

The Pope was given a crate of dates, a book on Mohammed and another on the Virgin Mary by Mohammed Nour Dachan, president of UCCOI, who also gave him a letter asking him to be a sponsor for the fifth annual celebration of a Day of Christian-Islamic dialog onb October 20, which will be the last Friday of teh Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

Mario Scialoja, president of the Italian section of the World Muslim League, and Imam Sergio Pallavicini of Milan, proposed that Jewish leaders should be invited to draw up together a joint statement among the three religions that would "further favor this new path of dialog."

Today, Archbishop Giovanni Lajola, president of the Governatorate of the Vatican City State (not the "Vatican foreign minister" as the article says) addresed the UN:

The Vatican’s foreign minister said that misunderstanding between cultures is breeding a "new barbarism" of violent extremists, and expressed hope that reason and dialogue would stop fundamentalists who use their faith as a pretext for attacks.

In a speech on the closing day of the U.N. General Assembly’s ministerial meeting, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo also said extremists are far from being devout believers, and undermine the very religion they claim to defend.

"Violent reactions are always a falsification of true religion," Lajolo said Wednesday in reference to a speech by Pope Benedict XVI about Islam which led to angry and sometimes violent protests by Muslims

By the way, the Vatican’s Permanent Observer Mission to the UN has its own website – here.