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Bush Visits Christianity's Holy Sites

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By ANNE GEARAN, The Associated Press

Published: January 12, 2008

SEA OF GALILEE, Israel - Immersed for two days in the intense world of Mideast peacemaking, President Bush looked relieved Friday to see something of the landscape all the fighting is about.

Bush retraced the steps of Jesus and his disciples in the ancient town of Capernaum and gazed out on the nearby Sea of Galilee, where the Bible says Jesus walked on water and calmed a sudden storm by commanding the wind and waves to cease. The waters were crystal blue and calm when Bush visited, leaning in to listen as a brown-robed friar narrated his tour with New Testament passages.

"An amazing experience," Bush happily said later.

Bush, who mentions his own religious faith frequently, is taking rare time out of a foreign trip for sightseeing, choosing visits to some of Christianity's holiest places. They included Friday's stops at the sites of Jesus' early teaching in northern Israel and Thursday's visit to Jesus' supposed birthplace in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.

After touring the Mount of Beatitudes, a grinning Bush held hands with two elderly nuns, laughing and posing for pictures. A larger group of nuns later gave him a crystal statue inscribed with words from the fabled Sermon on the Mount, recounted in Matthew Chapter 5: "Blessed are those who are peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

White House press secretary Dana Perino told reporters aboard Air Force One later that Bush especially enjoyed his time with the nuns.

"He said he loved their laughter. It was very joyous," Perino said.

Archbishop Elias Shakur, the Greek Catholic clergyman who showed Bush around the site, said he asked him, "Did you come as a politician, as a leader of state, or as a pilgrim?"

"I came as a pilgrim," Bush replied, according to Shakur. Before he left Jerusalem earlier Friday, Bush grew misty-eyed as he toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and heard a haunting prayer for the dead. The president, who first visited the memorial in 1998 when he was governor of Texas, was wearing a yarmulke as he rekindled an eternal flame and placed a red, white and blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps.

In the memorial's visitors book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."

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