JEDDAH, 17 September 2006 — The Vatican said yesterday that Pope Benedict is sorry Muslims were offended by a speech that provoked fury in the Islamic world and led to calls for the leader of the Catholic church to apologize personally.
The pope “sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of the Muslim faithful,” Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in a statement.
Bertone was referring to the pope’s speech at the University of Regensburg in his native Bavaria in southern Germany on Tuesday. Quoting 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II who said the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) had brought the world “evil and inhuman” things, the pope said, “He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’”
The pope was quoting from a book recounting a conversation between Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
Bertone, walking into the crisis only a day after taking over as “deputy pope,” said the 79-year-old pontiff confirmed “his respect and esteem for those who profess the Islamic faith” and hoped his words would be understood “in their true sense.”
The academic speech was meant as “a clear and radical rejection of religiously motivated violence, wherever it comes from,” said the statement, which came as criticism of the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics swelled.
Hours before Bertone’s statement, Saudi Arabia demanded an “urgent clarification” of the pope’s remarks. In a letter from Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal to his Vatican counterpart, the Kingdom said the pope’s lecture adopted “the logic that was used to justify the Crusades waged against the Islamic world,” the Saudi Press Agency reported. Morocco announced it was recalling its ambassador to the Vatican. The Moroccan Foreign Ministry said Ambassador Ali Achour would be recalled for consultation today on the instructions of King Mohammed VI.
Mohamed El Yazghi, the leader of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces, the main party in the governing coalition, welcomed the move. “It is a totally normal reaction from Morocco which is putting on record its disapproval of the comments of Benedict XVI, especially given that previous popes and the representatives of Islam had entered into a relationship of debate, reflection and getting to know each other,” he said.
In an early reaction to the Vatican statement, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood said it was not enough and it sought “a personal apology.” “We feel he has committed a grave error against us and that this mistake will only be removed through a personal apology,” the Brotherhood’s deputy leader, Mohammed Habib, said.
The head of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church yesterday became the first top Christian leader to join the Muslim world in its criticism of the pope’s remarks, apparently unmoved by the Vatican’s insistence that the Roman Catholic leader’s words were misinterpreted.
Coptic Pope Shenouda III said in published remarks that he did not hear Benedict’s exact words but that “any remarks which offend Islam and Muslims are against the teachings of Christ.”
But a British Muslim group praised Benedict for admitting “his mistake.” Ajmal Masroor, from the Islamic Society of Britain, told BBC it was “greatly noble” of the head of the Roman Catholic church to accept “his mistake.”
The Muslim backlash has cast doubt on pope’s planned visit to Turkey in November. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said before the Vatican statement that the pope’s comments were “ugly and unfortunate” and should be withdrawn. “The pope spoke like a politician rather than as a man of religion,” Erdogan said in televised remarks. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh publicly denounced the pontiff and five churches — only one of them Catholic — were attacked in the West Bank, although no one was hurt.
Egypt’s Foreign Ministry summoned the Vatican envoy to Cairo to express “extreme regret” at Benedict’s speech.
But Chancellor Angela Merkel and other German politicians defended his comments, saying he had been misunderstood. “It was an invitation to dialogue between religions,” she told the mass-circulation Bild newspaper in an interview.
