The Pope at the mosque

News: Pope offers forgiveness to Muslims during historic visit to a mosque

JOHN PAUL II, physically frail but indomitable, yesterday reached out across the growing Christian-Muslim divide and visited the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. His gesture of reconciliation was typical of a man who has convened a meeting of world religious leaders in Assisi, placed a prayer in the interstices of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and embarked on a series of journeys to centres of Orthodoxy - Romania, Georgia, Greece, with Ukraine and Armenia to follow.

Christian and Muslim communities fall out in Nigeria or Egypt, Pakistan or Indonesia. A Greek Orthodox priest in Athens describes John Paul as "the root of all evil". Yet the Pope continues his pilgrimages, forever trying to push back historical barriers. It has all been part of preparing the Roman Catholic Church for, and leading it through, the millennium, the core task of his reign.

Contrast that aspiration with the attitude of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who used the papal welcoming ceremony on Saturday to give renewed expression to his virulent anti-Semitism and will today seek to exploit for the same purpose his guest's visit to Quneitra. This Golan town, bombarded by the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, has been left in ruins to serve as a symbol of Jewish barbarity. Another authoritarian regime, that of Communist East Germany, left in ruins the Frauenkirche in Dresden for their own purposes.

Compare, too, the papal attempt to bridge the Catholic-Orthodox schism with the hostility displayed by the Greek clerics: Archbishop Christodoulos agreeing to meet John Paul only under pressure from the government and then refusing to pray with him or open a doctrinal debate. In the event, the Pope transformed the occasion by apologising for sins committed by Roman Catholics against the Orthodox Church, with special mention of the Latin Crusaders' sack of Constantinople in 1204.

In their meeting in Damascus yesterday, the Pope and the Grand Mufti listened to a ceremonial invocation of "One God". The venue was a potent reminder of what they share: the Umayyad Mosque, a former church, was embellished in the 8th century by Byzantine craftsmen, houses the Shrine of John the Baptist's Head and has a minaret called the Tower of Jesus. Taken in conjunction with the Pope's visit to the Holy Land last year, this unprecedented encounter is a further attempt to bring together the three great monotheistic faiths which honour Abraham as their father. That endeavour has marked John Paul's pontificate with greatness.