During his visit to Jordan, Pope Benedict visited a mosque, taken a trip to biblical Mt Nebo while appealing to Christians to “build bridges” with other religions and cultures and also to give witness to “respect for women”.
After an early Saturday morning visit to Mount Nebo, a pilgrimage site where one of the earliest churches in the Middle East was built commemorating the prophet Moses, Pope Benedict laid the foundation stone of a new Catholic run university which will be open to both Muslims and Christians, the ABC reports.
The pope urged inter-faith reconciliation but disappointed Muslim clerics by failing to offer a new apology for remarks seen as targeting Islam, AFP says.
In a keynote address to Muslim leaders in Amman’s huge Al-Hussein Mosque Pope Benedict bemoaned “ideological manipulation of religion” and urged Muslims and Christians to unite as “worshippers of God”.
“Certainly, the contradiction of tensions and divisions between the followers of different religious traditions, sadly, cannot be denied,” the leader of the world’s 1.1 billion Catholics told his audience.
“However, is it not also the case that often it is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society?”
Some Muslim clerics expressed disappointment however that the pontiff in his wide ranging speech had made no new apology for a 2006 address in which he quoted a medieval Christian emperor who criticised some teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as “evil and inhuman.”
But Prince Ghazi bin Mohammed, Jordanian King Abdullah II’s advisor on religious affairs who hosted the pontiff during his visit to the mosque, was more conciliatory.
“I would like to thank you for expressing regret over the lecture in 2006, which hurt the feelings of Muslims,” Ghazi told the pope.
Sunday, the Pope celebrated Mass with tens of thousands of worshippers from the dwindling Christian churches of the Middle East, urging them to maintain their presence in region, the UK Telegraph reports.
“The strong Christian families of these lands are a great legacy handed down from earlier generations,” the pope told the crowd of about 30,000. “May the courage of Christ our shepherd inspire and sustain you in your efforts... to maintain the Church’s presence in the changing social fabric of these ancient lands.”
Christians make up less than three percent of Jordan’s population, which has been swelled by up to a million refugees from the war in Iraq to between six and seven million in recent years.
Among the refugees are believed to be 40,000 of Iraq’s Christian population, mainly Chaldean Catholics.
Other Christian leaders present included Greek Othodox, Melkites, Egyptian Copts, and Maronites, as well as Catholic groups who arrived by the bus load from across Syria and Lebanon and well as Jordan itself.
The Pope appealed to them to “build bridges” with other religions and cultures, but he also appeared to continue a theme of attacking extremism when he said they had a special responsibility to bear witness to “respect for women”.
SOURCE
Pope visits Jordan’s biggest mosque (ABC News)
Pope disappoints Muslim leaders (AFP)
Pope Benedict XVI issues plea for Middle East Christians (UK Telegraph)