GLOBEAND MAIL: Benedict aims to ease tensions with both Jews and Muslims
JERUSALEM — On a self-declared pilgrimage of peace, Pope Benedict XVI is walking into a minefield.
In the four short years of his papacy, he has succeeded in upsetting the Muslim world with his reference to an anti-Islamic tract, and in alienating many Jews by his resuscitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop and backing of the beatification of Nazi-era Pope Pius XII.
Yet, here he is today, hoping to make amends, wading into one of the holiest sites of both religions, with recent conflicts still smouldering and the eyes of the world upon him.
“The thing that worries me most is the speech that the Pope will deliver here,” said Fouad Twal, the Pope's Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem. “One word for the Muslims and I'm in trouble; one word for the Jews and I'm in trouble. At the end of the visit the Pope goes back to Rome and I stay here with the consequences.”
Regardless of the risks, the Pope began his homage to Judaism on Saturday at Mount Nebo, in Jordan. Looking across the valley at Moses's Promised Land, he spoke of the inseparable bond between his church and the Jewish people.
“From the beginning, the church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the [Jewish] patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two testaments [of the Bible],” the Pope said.
With the ancient link established, the Pope, as his first order of business today, visits Yad Vashem, Israel's shrine to the victims of the Holocaust and touchstone of the modern Jewish state.
“We expect that Pope Benedict XVI's speech at Yad Vashem will include a reference to the memory of the Holocaust in the present as well as in the future,” Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem's chairman of the directorate, told reporters. Mr. Shalev recalled that the Pope, as Joseph Ratzinger, spent his childhood as a member of the Hitler Youth and later enlisted in the German army.
“It is impossible to claim that these things do not have an impact,” he said. “A person's habitat bears an influence on him, despite the fact that immediately after the war he disengaged from these things and devoted himself to studying religion.” >>> Patrick Martin | Sunday, May 10, 2009
