Vatican officially confirms pope’s Turkey trip

  The Vatican on Monday officially confirmed that Pope Benedict XVI will visit Turkey at the end of November, a trip that had been put into doubt by Muslim anger over his controversial comments about Islam.

  The confirmation of the Nov. 28-Dec. 1 trip to the predominantly Muslim nation came in an advisory to journalists on accreditation and a separate announcement that he was making the trip at the invitation of President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.

  The German pope will spend four days in Turkey, making stops at the capital, Ankara, as well as İzmir, Ephesus -- where legend says Christ's mother went after his death -- and Istanbul.

  The main purpose of the visit is to meet in Istanbul with Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartolomeos. But the issue of Christian unity -- while still the main topic of the trip -- has been largely overshadowed by the worldwide controversy that followed his Sept. 12 lecture at Regensburg University in his native Germany.

  In the lecture, he quoted 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus who spoke of the Prophet Mohammed's “command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

  The leader of more than 1 billion Catholics has several times expressed regret for the reaction to the speech but he has stopped short of the unequivocal apology wanted by some Muslims. Since the speech, the pope or Vatican officials have said at least a dozen times that it has been misunderstood.

  Some of the strongest criticism of the speech came from Turkey, where Turkish nationalists and Islamic activists have pushed for the trip to be cancelled.

  Even before the controversy over his comments on Islam, the pope was already viewed with suspicion in Turkey. When he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and worked as the Vatican's top doctrinal official, the future pope said he was against Turkey's bid to join the European Union.

  Some have accused him of undoing the decades of bridge-building with Muslims by his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

  Patriarch Bartolomeos has said the controversy over the Islam remarks meant Benedict would be met by cooler welcome in Muslim Turkey than he would have otherwise.

  “There will certainly be nationalists and fanatical Muslims who will campaign against the visit until the last minute,” Bartolomeos told reporters in Istanbul last month.

  Bartolomeos, who has his headquarters in Istanbul, had hoped that the pontiff would visit last Nov. 30. But the Turkish government, instead of approving that visit instead issued its own invitation to Benedict for 2006.

  In September, the pope met ambassadors from predominantly Muslim countries, including Turkey, 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 to be released on Friday -- was rewritten to address the tensions that arose after the pope's lecture.