Pope Apologizes for Uproar Over His Remarks
By Ian Fisher
The New York Times, September 17
ROME, Sept. 17 — Pope Benedict XVI sought Sunday to extinguish days of anger and protest among Muslims by issuing an extraordinary personal apology for having caused offense with a speech last week that cited a reference to Islam as “evil and inhuman.” “I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address,” the pope told pilgrims at the summer papal palace of Castel Gandolfo, “which were considered offensive. These were in fact quotations from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought."
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His apology came amid much worry in the church about violence and any erosion of the status of the papacy as a neutral figure for peace among faiths...Beyond the anger among Muslims, the pope’s comments have also provoked a complicated debate in Italy and among many Catholics, on issues including whether he appreciated the reaction he would provoke and whether the pope’s speeches, which he usually writes himself, are properly vetted by a Vatican undergoing a bureaucratic transition. Several Vatican officials said they had expressed concern before the speech was delivered that it might be negatively received by Muslims or be misconstrued by the news media as an attack on Islam.
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In Egypt, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been critical of the pope, initially said Sunday that the pope’s remarks represented a “good step toward an apology.” Later statements from the group, however, seemed to cast doubt on whether it accepted the apology fully.
In Gaza, the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya, denounced attacks on some half-dozen churches there and in the West Bank. In Bethlehem, sacred to Christians as the birthplace of Jesus and home to many Arab Christians, police presence was higher than usual. “The Christian brothers are a part of the Palestinian people, and I heard the highest Christian authority in Palestine denouncing the statements against Islam and against Muslims,” Mr. Haniya told reporters.
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While anger remained high in Turkey, the nation’s foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, said on Sunday that he expected Benedict’s planned trip there in November would go ahead. But he called the pope’s remarks “really regrettable.” The Vatican’s new secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, also said Sunday that he expected the pope’s visit to Turkey to proceed.
The furor, which has left Benedict’s 17-month papacy with its first major crisis, has also set off a round of second-guessing in the Vatican and among church experts about exactly what happened. First among the questions — which the pope refuted on Sunday — is whether he in fact intended to make a statement about Islam and violence. Second is whether he realized the extent of the reaction.
But more concretely, experts said, the issue raised questions both about how the church operates under this new pope, and to what extent his statements are checked and balanced diplomatically now that he is no longer an academic but the leader of the world’s billion Roman Catholics. Benedict is used to writing his own speeches, and several Vatican officials said he wrote Tuesday’s address, one of the most significant of the papacy, by himself. The officials, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss this publicly, said that there was concern in the Vatican before he delivered it, both about the reaction among Muslims and how the news media would portray the passages relating to Islam. That concern was relayed up the chain of command, the officials said, but it is not clear if it reached the pope.
At a time when the Vatican has just replaced its second-in-command and its foreign minister, many experts also said that the Vatican does not have enough experts on Islam to gauge reaction to any papal statements. “They have nobody to really ask,” said the Rev. Thomas Michel, secretary for inter-religious dialogue for the Jesuit order of priests. “Whoever looked at it and let that go through is someone who doesn’t understand Muslims at all.”
In February, Benedict reassigned the Vatican’s most senior Arab expert, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, then the head of inter-religious dialogue, to Cairo as the Vatican envoy there. The move was seen at the time by some church experts as a sign of Benedict’s skepticism about the value of dialogue with Muslims. “I think one may say, if it is not too impolite, that it is time to bring back Monsignor Fitzgerald,” said Alberto Melloni, professor of history at the University of Modena, who has written several books on the Vatican.
