VATICAN CITY, May 23: Pope Benedict XVI, acknowledging the “suffering” of indigenous Latin Americans, moved on Wednesday to control damage caused by remarks made during his trip to Brazil, eight months after roiling the Muslim world with comments linking Islam to violence.

One cannot “ignore the suffering and the injustices inflicted by the colonisers on the indigenous populations” whose “fundamental human rights were often trampled on,” Benedict said during his weekly general audience.

The pope had said on the last day of his May 9-13 trip to Brazil that “Christianity was not imposed by a foreign culture,” drawing a sharp reaction from leaders of indigenous groups to whom the remark smacked of revisionism.

“Christ was the Savior (America's natives) silently yearned for,” the intellectual pope added in the speech in the Marian shrine town of Aparecida.

The 80-year-old Benedict also called the resurgence of pre-Columbian religions “a step backward,” offending native peoples as far away as Mexico.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez demanded an apology following Benedict's trip, his first to the Western Hemisphere since his election as pope two years ago.

The pope is sometimes “remarkably tone-deaf to how his pronouncements may sound to people who don't share his intellectual and cultural premises,” said Vatican expert John Allen of the US-based National Catholic Reporter in an online editorial.In fact, Benedict's reasoning was that “because Christ came for all (humankind) ... Christianity was not alien to pre-Columbian cultures; it was the fulfilment to which their religious experience pointed,” Allen said, noting that the pope had failed to “bend over backwards” to recall the vicious acts of individual Christian colonisers.

By contrast, Benedict's predecessor John Paul II, during a 1992 visit to the Dominican Republic, asked for forgiveness from indigenous peoples for the suffering inflicted by Spanish colonisers.

More generally, Benedict and John Paul II, while sharing deeply conservative views, could not be more different in their approach to public opinion and the media.

The gaffe in Brazil recalled the fury of Muslims all over the world sparked by Benedict's reference in September to a medieval Christian emperor who equated Islam with violence.

The pope, while insisting that its content had been misinterpreted, said he was “deeply sorry” for any offence the comments caused.

But he stopped short of apologising for the remarks, and the Vatican website posted an annotated version of the speech, in which Benedict wrote that the offending phrase “does not express my personal opinion on the Koran, for which I feel the respect that is due to the holy book of a great religion”. During his first trip to a Muslim country as pontiff – to Turkey in November – the pope made a stunning conciliatory gesture by stopping for a moment of prayer inside Istanbul's Blue Mosque.

The move buried the controversy for many Muslim leaders.—AFP