Pope Benedict XVI will meet Jewish, Muslim and fellow Christian
leaders during a visit to his native Germany in September, according to a
schedule released by the German Episcopal Conference Wednesday.
The
head of the Roman Catholic Church will begin the four-day trip on
September 22 in Berlin, where he will hold talks with representatives of
the Jewish community in a room at the German parliament, the bishops
said in a statement.
The next day he will meet Muslim clerics in
the Apostolic Nunciature in Berlin, the diplomatic mission of the Holy
See, followed by talks with Lutheran representatives on his next stop,
in the eastern city of Erfurt.
During his stay in the southwestern city of Freiburg on September 24, he will address representatives of the Orthodox churches.
It
will be Benedict's first state visit to Germany, following appearances
in the western city of Cologne while it was hosting a World Youth Day
event in 2005 and his native region of Bavaria in 2006, which was
declared a private visit.
Relations with Muslims were strained
after he made a controversial speech at a German university in 2006 in
which he appeared to link Islam with violence.
The Vatican has worked
since then to mend fences.
The pope also moved to heal a historic
rift with Jews with a book published in March in which he exonerated the
Jewish people from responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed the pope's "courage".
However tensions between the two faiths have repeatedly erupted in recent years.
In
2007, the pope reinstated a "prayer for the conversion of Jews" and the
following year he infuriated the Jewish community with a decision to
lift the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Richard
Williamson.
There have also been Vatican moves to sanctify World
War II-era pope Pius XII, whose public silence on the Holocaust has been
widely criticised.