Liberal pundits and Italian communists may want the next Pope to “reach out” to Islam, but the Vatican is having second thoughts. (Hat tip: Mom of 9.)

ROME, April 12 — After two decades of contact and dialogue with the Islamic world under Pope John Paul II, the Vatican is rethinking an outreach program that critics say is diluting Catholicism and has brought almost no benefits to beleaguered Catholic minorities in Muslim countries.

The late pontiff undertook the drive as part of a broad effort to open channels to other religions. He applied a personal stamp by stepping into a mosque in Damascus and meeting with Muslim groups more than 60 times. He also visited a synagogue in Rome and Jerusalem’s Western Wall.

Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, said the next pope might more emphatically demand rights for Christian minorities in Islamic countries and the freedom of all people to choose their faith.

“There may be a greater insistence on religious liberty,” said Fitzgerald, the church’s point man on Islamic relations. “But I don’t think we’re going to go to war. The times of the Crusades are over… . I don’t see any fundamental change in the way the church has been dealing with these questions.”

Justo Lacunza Balda, who heads the Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, a Vatican research group, said criticism was focused on the lack of reciprocal goodwill gestures in many Muslim countries. “Humanly speaking, it is of course important to see some payback,” he said.

It wouldn’t be the WaPo, of course, if they didn’t try to minimize the problem:

One Turkish newspaper, Hurriyet, said the pope had not apologized for the Crusades and that Muslims were waiting. Radical Islamic Web sites sometimes predict that Muslims will conquer Europe and set up headquarters in the Vatican.

Here we go, doing the media’s work for them again.

Far more than “one Turkish newspaper” wants an apology for the Crusades; the truth is that the demand for an apology was issued by Islam’s highest leaders at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.

And “radical Islamic web sites” are far from the only places where you can find predictions that Muslims will conquer Europe. This kind of decidedly unfriendly Islamic supremacism is also being promoted by some of Islam’s most respected figures.