Pope Benedict will meet Muslim ambassadors to the Vatican and Italian Islamic leaders on Monday to try to calm lingering anger over his use of a medieval text that says their religion was spread by violence.
”The purpose of this meeting is to relaunch dialogue with the Islamic world,” said a senior Vatican official on Friday, after invitations were sent for the meeting on Monday at the Pope’s summer palace in Castelgandolfo, outside Rome.
With protests continuing at Friday prayers at mosques around the world, Islamic diplomats accredited to the Holy See hoped the meeting would help restore trust between the Roman Catholic Church and Muslims offended by the Pope’s speech last week.
”We welcome it and are definitely going to participate,” said Iran’s deputy ambassador to the Holy See, Ahmad Faihma.
”This is a positive signal from the Vatican. I know that this will improve relations with the Islamic world,” he said.
”This meeting will be very important, especially in these days, to try to stop every action that is not good,” said Fathi Abuabed at the Arab League’s Vatican mission.
The leader of more than one billion Roman Catholics has expressed regret three times in the past week for the reaction to a speech in which he quoted 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who spoke of the Prophet Muhammad’s ”command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.
But he has stopped short of the unequivocal apology wanted by Muslims for the speech at a university in his native Germany.
Turkey’s religious affairs director Ali Bardakoglu urged the Pope not to use the meeting just to reiterate that he was misunderstood. He told CNN Turk that taking this line ”comes near to accusing people of blindness in their perceptions”.
But Bardakoglu would consider meeting if Benedict’s planned trip to Turkey in November goes ahead. The violence of reactions has raised security concerns. Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981, warned Benedict not to travel to Turkey, saying his life would be at risk.
In Afghanistan, where 10 people died in February in protests against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in European papers, scholars called the remarks ”psychological warfare” on Islam.
”He ignorantly hurt the hearts of one-and-a-half billion Muslims,” Enayatullah Baleegh, senior cleric at Kabul’s main Blue Mosque, said at Friday prayers. Some members of the congregation chanted ”Death to the Pope!”
In Malaysia, about 300 Muslims waved anti-Pope banners at a peaceful rally and supporters of the opposition Islamic party PAS demanded the Pope’s resignation.
Clumsy
One cardinal, Stanislaw Rylko, expressed solidarity with the Pope on Friday, telling the pontiff he and the church he heads were being ”unfairly attacked from many sides”.
The Pope said at his Wednesday audience his real intention had been to ”explain that religion and violence do not go together but religion and reason do”.
Western politicians, including United States President George Bush, and Christian church leaders have tried to calm the crisis by ensuring Muslims that the Pope was sincere when he expressed regret at the offence caused.
But many Islamic organisations, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, want the Pope to apologise for using the quote and explain in detail what his views on Islam are.
Iraq’s Vatican envoy, Albert Edward Ishmail Yelda, said he hoped there would be an ”exchange of views” at the meeting on Monday rather than just a papal speech.
”I hope we’ll be able to put an end to the misunderstanding between the Vatican and Islamic and Arab nations,” he said.
Even sympathetic observers say the Pope was clumsy to use such an inflammatory quote and behaved more like the theology professor he used to be than a church leader whose every word in public is reported by the world’s media.
Italy and the Vatican’s own security service have tightened security around the Pope because of the sometimes violent reaction to his speech.
One of the few signs that the crisis may have peaked came from Iran’s hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who told US television this week that since the Pope had expressed his regrets ”there is no problem”. — Reuters