ROME, Oct. 4 — A lineup of clerics, brought together by the left-leaning Catholic group that won this year's Unesco peace prize, was expected to offer some well-chosen, hopeful words — a little preaching from the converted.
But then, the very first religious speaker at the conference began by loudly excoriating "arrogant Zionists."
By the end of the morning, several others had explicitly tied terrorism to the treatment of Palestinians in Israel, expressed strong anti-American feelings and shown how hard it was even for some relatively moderate religious leaders to moderate their language when it came to recent events.
The first speaker, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a theologian and director of the Sunna Research Center in Qatar, denounced the attacks, but added: "We Arabs are among the most sensitive to this because of the evil inflicted on us by arrogant Zionists. We go to sleep at night and get up in the morning in a Palestine transformed into a continuous funeral. We refuse terrorism but don't consider it terrorism to defend one's own home."
Mr. Qaradawi, who has expressed similar views in the past, noted that Timothy McVeigh, convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing, "was an American and a Christian, but his guilt was not generalized to all Americans and all Christians."
No Jews were invited to speak here at the meeting that ended today and that was organized by the Sant'Egidio Community, a Catholic lay group with a history of mediating international conflicts.
The community, which meets nightly for prayer and has smaller groups in at least 40 other countries, has been honored for brokering a 1992 peace accord in Mozambique. It has tried similar initiatives, with varying degrees of success, in Albania, Angola, Guatemala, Kosovo, Lebanon, Somalia and Burundi.
When asked why no Jews were at the table and whether Muslims and Christians were bonding here at the Jews' expense, the group's founder, Andrea Riccardi, said: "We are not building an alliance against the Jewish world. We aren't excluding, but concentrating on one problem."
He mentioned Sant'Egidio's long history of dialogue with Jewish groups, and said that in two weeks his group would commemorate the killing of the Jews in Rome during World War II.
When asked about Mr. Qaradawi's comments in particular at the news conference, Mr. Riccardi said, "We don't believe in a phony dialogue." He added that in his experience, the act of sharing views frankly, even rather too frankly, can have a positive effect.
Not everyone used fighting words, of course.
After Mr. Qaradawi came Cardinal Carlo Martini, archbishop of Milan, who many moderate Catholics hope will be the next pope.
Cardinal Martini may have been responding to Mr. Qaradawi, seated to his right on the dais, in the first thing he said here: "We have to be vigilant of our language."
"The believer knows that darkness and death will never have the last word," he said, paraphrasing Pope John Paul II, "but that's only if every one of us will banish violence from our own words and feelings."
After the cardinal spoke, Mr. Qaradawi leaned toward him, smiled and pointed to his heart, indicating that his words had touched him.
Abdullah Omar Nasseef, the Saudi president of the World Muslim Conference, was also among the more conciliatory speakers, saying: "Violence happens only in environments that are not religious. The mass media insist on a conflict between religions, while the Koran insists on the contrary."
One point of agreement among speakers was a dim view of recent comments by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy on the superiority of Western civilization.
"There is no one civilization superior to the other, because every civilization has its particular character," said Mar Gregorios Iohanna Ibrahim of the Syrian Orthodox Church.
Tonight, the Sant'Egidio Community issued a statement saying everyone at the conference had "expressed their mutual concern about avoiding the risk of any reciprocal misunderstanding or mistrust" had promised to keep meeting and keep talking.