ROME — At churches in Baghdad, parishioners hung signs to say they disagreed with the pope.
In Egypt, priests of the Orthodox Coptic Church denounced Pope Benedict XVI's remarks about Islam and said they wished he had considered the reaction before speaking.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday September 23, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Vatican office: An article in Wednesday's Section A about reaction to Pope Benedict XVI's remarks regarding Islam incorrectly said that Cardinal Paul Poupard had "succeeded" Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald as head of a Vatican office on inter-religious affairs. The office Fitzgerald directed was absorbed into a larger Vatican department that Poupard oversees.
In Lebanon, where bloody demonstrations erupted early this year over a Danish newspaper's caricatures of the prophet Muhammad, a Christian-Muslim dialogue committee asked imams to keep their Friday sermons calm.
The enraged response to the pope's speech last week, in which he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who regarded teachings of Muhammad as "evil and inhuman," has dealt a stinging blow to decades of efforts by the Roman Catholic Church and others to ease tensions and open lines of communication between Muslims and Christians.
An apology by the pope Sunday has only partially quelled the anger.
In Christian communities in predominantly Muslim countries, many believers, leaders and laymen alike, have thought that safety required distancing themselves from the pope and his comments.
In Egypt, where 10% of the population of 79 million is Christian, residents remember days of sectarian fighting that erupted this spring in the normally genteel city of Alexandria, a sign of how volatile Muslim-Christian relations can be.
"Some of my best friends are Muslims, and so far we have adapted to live here as minorities," said William Harb Jaleel, 59, an employee of the Finance Ministry in Cairo and a Coptic Christian.
"But with the presences of Al Qaeda and its followers here, it really makes us an easy goal for these fanatics to target and kill us," he said. "So the last thing we need is for the pope to provoke anybody and escalate the already tense situations; we just hate to be the victims of stuff we were never responsible for."
In Lebanon, where nearly 40% of the population is Christian and where religious differences have long cleaved the country, there have been no calls for demonstrations and no violence associated with the pope's comments.
"But in the long term," said Father Samir Khalil Samir, director of an Arab Christian research center at St. Joseph University in Beirut, "there is a fear that Christians in the country and in other Arab states will feel insecure and encouraged to emigrate."
