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Pope Emphasizes 'Respect' for Muslims NewsMax.com Wires VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict took another step on Monday towards mending relations with Muslims, saying he understood their indignation over his controversial comments and assuring them of his respect for their "great religion."
The Pope's latest attempt at clarification of his comments, made in a Sept. 12 lecture at Regensburg University in his native Germany, were in footnotes to the original speech posted on the Vatican's website.
In the lecture, the Pope quoted 14th-century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus who spoke of the Prophet Mohammad's "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
In the footnotes, the Pope again said that his comments had been misunderstood.
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"In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation," he said in one footnote.
"I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Koran, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion," he wrote.
"I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic," the Pope wrote.
When he first gave the speech in Germany, the Vatican said it would eventually publish a version with footnotes.
The footnotes were at least the fifth time the Pope has tried to make amends over the speech, which sparked violent protests in several Muslim countries and handed him the toughest international crisis since his election in April, 2005.
The leader of more than one billion Catholics has several times expressed regret for the reaction to the speech but he has stopped short of the unequivocal apology wanted by Muslims for the speech.
Some have accused him of undoing decades of bridge-building by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.
Two weeks ago, he met with ambassadors from predominantly Muslim countries and assured them that he was committed to dialogue with Islam.
Church sources have said the Vatican's annual message to the Islamic world to mark the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan due for late October, was being rewritten to address the tensions that arose after the Pope's lecture.
The Vatican has said the Pope's trip to predominantly Muslim Turkey at the end of November, which some Turks want to be called off, would go ahead as planned.
(c) Reuters 2006. All rights reserved.
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