Pope ends rollercoaster year

08 Dec, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI's first full year as head of the Roman Catholic Church has been a rollercoaster ride in which he unwittingly became an antagonist in the "clash of civilisations" between East and West.
An intellectual speech in September in which the pope referred to an obscure Byzantine emperor's remarks linking Islam and violence. The comments at a German university unleashed a torrent of sometimes violent protests across the Muslim world against the leader of the world's 1.1 billion Catholics.
An Islamic scholar in Kabul likened Benedict to Hitler, Stalin and US President George W. Bush, while a Qatari sheik said the pope "should have been prudent before making remarks that hurt a nation of a billion-and-a-half people."
A series of apologies - for being misunderstood - and clarifications did little to quell the anger, boding ill for his long-planned trip to mainly Muslim Turkey from November 28 to December 1.
The pope also met with 22 Muslim envoys in an effort to patch up diplomatic ties and reiterate his desire for inter-faith dialogue. But the meeting merely served to confirm that Benedict did not see dialogue in the same way as his charismatic predecessor John Paul II, analysts charged.
The trip to Turkey provided the setting Benedict needed for a grand conciliatory gesture - a visit to Istanbul's Blue Mosque during which he prayed side by side with the city's Mufti Mustafa Cagrici, facing Mecca and assuming a classic Muslim prayer posture.
The moment was "even more meaningful than an apology" for the remarks in September, Cagrici said afterward. "It is a great gesture of peace," commented Dalil Boubakeur, a moderate French Muslim leader and rector of the Paris Mosque. "One can only see in it a profound indication of the fraternal ties between Islam and Christianity."
"It is an act of great symbolic and theological - even historic - significance," he said. For his part Benedict, in his first weekly audience since returning home from Turkey, voiced relief that the trip had passed off "happily" despite challenges "on several fronts."
Another high point of Benedict's year was his pilgrimage in May to Poland, the homeland of his predecessor John Paul II, when more than 2.5 million pilgrims turned out to see him. He made a poignant visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and encouraged hopes for fast-tracking of sainthood for John Paul II.
The pope's crisis in relations with the Muslim world tended to eclipse his priorities of furthering his friend and mentor John Paul II's conservative agenda and combatting secularisation in Europe and North America.
During a visit to his native Germany - where more than 100,000 Catholics are said to leave the Church every year - he criticised the German Church for its reluctance to evangelise.
Bishops in Africa and eastern Europe had, the pope said, learned from experience that "evangelisation should be foremost .. if progress is to be made on social issues and reconciliation is to begin and if, for example, AIDS is to be combatted by realistically facing its deeper causes".
Last month Benedict rejected calls for the Roman Catholic Church to allow priests to marry, reaffirming the "importance" of celibacy despite fears of a schism over the issue.
In September, he had excommunicated Zambian archbishop Emmanuel Milingo for ordaining four married men as bishops. Milingo, founder of the "Married Priests Now!" movement, warns that some 150,000 Catholic priests around the world "are not called to serve in this medieval Church that requires celibacy." Milingo is gathering some 1,000 married priests at a meeting in New York this weekend.
The pope also stood firm on a key issue dividing the Roman Catholic Church and the estranged Eastern branch of Christianity - papal authority - even though a principal purpose of his trip to Turkey was to seek reconciliation with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.
After meetings with Bartholomew I, spiritual leader of some 150 million Orthodox faithful, the pope described as a "scandal to the world" the schism between the feuding Christian branches dating back nearly a millennium. But he also stressed the Vatican's "universal" role.

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