GERMANY:Pope Benedict's XVI's private secretary, Fr Georg Gänswein, has said that the pontiff's speech in Regensburg last year that prompted worldwide protests from Muslims was deliberately controversial and even "prophetic".
The speech sparked outraged reaction from Muslim leaders and several scholars suggested the pope had made a slip in using a quote describing Muhammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman".
Now his closest aide has said the pope personally wrote his Regensburg speech with a definite political aim: to counter what Gänswein calls a "blue-eyed" approach to Islam in Europe.
He said the papal entourage only heard of the first "harsh reactions" to the speech after returning from Bavaria to Rome.
"It was a big surprise, including for the pope," he said. "The powerful whirlwind was initially caused by news reports which took a certain quote out of context and presented that as the pope's personal opinion."
In a dense theological lecture on faith and reason, the pontiff quoted a 14th-century emperor asking: "Show me just what Muhammad 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. "
In the days after the lecture, delivered at the university where he once taught, increasingly violent Muslim protests spread around the world.
At the height of the events, the Vatican issued a statement indicating the speech was about the dangers of separating faith and reason and that it was not the pope's intention to offend Muslims.
"The attempts at Islamification in the west cannot be talked away . . . The Catholic Church sees this very clearly and says it too," says Gänswein "It's important to grasp that there is no one Islam . . . but many, often enemy currents right up to extremists who cite the Koran to explain their activities and use weapons to go to work."