Pope Benedict hits out at jihad

REGENSBURG (Germany): Pope Benedict XVI hit out at Islam and its concept of Holy War late on Tuesday during one of the last public appearances of his six-day visit to his Bavarian homeland.

The thinly-veiled attack on extremist Islam's justification for terrorism came in a complex theological lecture to staff and students at the University of Regensburg, where the former Joseph Ratzinger taught theology in the 1970s.

Using the words, "Jihad" and "Holy War" in his lecture, the pope quoted criticisms of the Prophet Mohammed by a 14th Century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II.

"Show me just what Mohammed 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," Benedict quoted him as saying in a contemporary debate with a learned Persian.

"The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable," said Benedict, during his 32-minute lecture on the relationship between faith and reason.

"Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul," he added.

Reiterating his concerns about a modern world "deaf" to God, he warned that other religious cultures saw the West's exclusion of God "as an attack on their most profound  convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures," he said.

Although the section of the lecture dealing with Islam was relatively short, its inclusion made his address at Regensburg the most political of his six-day visit, which had previously dealt exclusively with spiritual matters.

Presiding later over an ecumenical prayer meeting with Orthodox Christian and Protestant leaders, the pope led prayers for the success of ongoing discussions with other Churches aimed ultimately at uniting Christians, a clear aim of his pontificate.

At a giant open-air mass earlier Tuesday attended by some 250,000 pilgrims, the pope urged them to stand up for their beliefs in the face of the "hatred and fanaticism" tarnishing religion.

Such an atmosphere made it "important to state clearly the God in whom we believe," the pope said.

The white-haired pontiff waved to the cheering crowd from his popemobile as he arrived for the mass, celebrated atop a giant altar surrounded by priests and choirs.

"Today, when we have learned to recognize the pathologies and life-threatening diseases associated with religion and reason, and the ways that God's image can be destroyed by hatred and fanaticism, it is important to state clearly the God in whom we believe," said the pope.

"Only this God saves us from being afraid of the world and from anxiety before the emptiness of life."

A young man charged towards the altar where the pope was sitting at the end of the mass, but he was stopped by plain-clothes police officers and the pontiff was not in danger, Bavaria's Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein said.

The mayor of Regensburg, Hans Schaidinger, said: "It was not a serious disruption to security. It was apparently a young fan, who in his excitement wanted to reach the altar."

Benedict earlier told the congregation at his open-air mass that he had been taken aback by the goodwill of local people, including those who spruced up the house he maintains in nearby Pentling which he will visit on Wednesday.

The Vatican said the pope would spend Wednesday on a private visit with his 82-year-old brother Georg, a retired priest, and visit the cemetery where their parents and sister are buried.