Pope Benedict XVI's decision to go ahead with a visit to Israel is "courageous" given the never-ending strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, the Vatican's spokesman said Saturday."There are continuing tensions in a region prone to conflict, including recently a war that devastated the Gaza Strip and profoundly wounded its people," said Father Frederico Lombardi on Vatican radio.
"The peace process has hardly made any decisive steps. Shadows and mistrust repeatedly darken the dialogue that is well underway between the Jewish world and the Catholic church."
"But nevertheless he must go -- and perhaps for all these reasons it is urgent to go, to pray at the most important places where hate and love confront each other, where reconciliation seems humanly impossible."
To go to the Jewish state is nothing less than a "courageous decision," said Lombardi two days after Pope Benedict confirmed that he would go to the Middle East this year despite a furore over a Holocaust-denying bishop.
News media reports in Italy say the leader of the world's Roman Catholics will go to Jordan and then Israel and the Palestinian territories on May 8-15, stopping in Amman, Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem.
Pope Benedict said Thursday it was "intolerable" to deny the Holocaust, as he confronted controversy over ultra-conservative bishop Richard Williamson's claim that no Jews died in Nazi gas chambers.
"Any denial or minimisation of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable," he told leaders of the Conference of American Jewish Organisations, to whom he confirmed his plans to visit Israel.
The uproar began when Pope Benedict on January 24 lifted the excommunication of Williamson and three other members of the breakaway Society of Saint Pius X, which rejects the liberal Vatican reforms in the early 1960s.
Six million Jews perished during the Holocaust which ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945.
The German-born pope, 81, has also found himself in hot water with Muslims, native Indians, Poles, gays and even scientists during his nearly four years as pontiff.
Memories are still fresh of the fury Pope Benedict unleashed in the Muslim world with a speech in September 2006 in which he appeared to endorse the view of an obscure 14th-century Byzantine emperor that Islam is inherently violent.
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(Source: AFP)