In the letter, the bishops also make an invitation to unity and to strengthening the Christian identity, according to Saint Paul’s lesson, "the heritage of all of the disciples of Christ, but particularly of us, who are the children of this land which saw Him be born, preach Christ all the time and testify to Him in so many ordeals". "Our communities", reads the document, "live as a religious minority. We are surrounded by a Muslim world, in which faith in God is still widespread in its traditional aspects as well as in the spreading of new Islamic religious organisations. It is just this situation, somehow similar to that of the first communities living in a diaspora, that drives us to be more aware of our own identity", which is not based, specify the bishops, on "faith in God, which is shared by our Muslim brothers and by many other men", but on "faith in Christ". According to the bishops, Saint Paul’s writings and testimony "have always been a spur as well as a soul searching about the way of being Christians. Against the ever-recurring attempts to make the Christian faith a religious phenomenon that does not demand conversion they state , Paul is always ready to remind us that "one is not born a Christian, one becomes one". (continued)
