Pope Benedict XVI hosted some 300 representatives of world religions in Assisi, Italy on Thursday, Oct. 27, for an interfaith summit on justice and peace, with distinct changes made to the event first convened 25 years ago by Pope John Paul II.

The Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, warned of the threat to peace posed by widespread youth unemployment. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world's Eastern Orthodox Christians, lamented the "increased marginalization of Christian communities in the Middle East."

Archbishop Norvan Zakarian, primate of the Armenian Apostolic Church in France, denounced the "gravest of all crimes, genocide," though he did not specifically mention the killing of more than 1 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks following World War I.

For his part, Benedict denounced terrorism in the name of God, which he called the "antithesis of religion," The Huffington Post reported.