The Turkish Equation

IN NOVEMBER, Pope Benedict XVI will visit the predominantly Muslim nation of Turkey. The Vatican announced in February that the Pope had accepted an invitation from Turkish president Ahmet Necdet Sezer. The three-day visit will coincide with the feast of St. Andrew, the patron of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, on November 30.

A missionary slain

Confirmation of the visit was made within days of the Pope revealing that he had been invited by Fr. Andrea Santoro to visit his little parish in Trabzon. The Pope had received a letter from the missionary priest shortly before he was shot dead while praying in Trabzon's Santa Maria Catholic Church.
Fr. Santoro's death on February 5 came as violence spread across the Muslim world in reaction to the publishing of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a suicide bomber. A gunman screamed 'Allah-u-Akhbar' (God is great) as he fired two shots from close range at the 61-year-old priest. Two days later, Turkish police arrested a 16-year-old male in connection with the killing. Turkey's NTV news channel said the youth confessed to killing the priest because he was angered by the cartoons of Mohammed. Any portrayal of the Prophet is blasphemous in Islam, lest it encourages idolatry. The cartoons had first appeared in Denmark's Jyllands-Posten last September, and were subsequently reprinted early this year in more than 20 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, North America and even in Jordan and Yemen.
The Vatican condemned both European newspapers for publishing the cartoons, and the anti-Western violence they triggered across the Muslim world. 'The right to freedom of thought and expression... does not imply the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers,' said the Vatican statement. 'Exasperated criticism or derision of others... can comprise an inadmissible provocation'.

A martyr mourned

Fr. Santoro had been a popular parish priest in Rome since his ordination in 1970. He had been working in Turkey as a missionary priest for five years, and was known for helping troubled youth and promoting inter-religious dialogue as well as ministering to a flock of about 20 worshippers. The Santa Maria Church in Trabzon where he served was built in the 19th century on the orders of an Ottoman sultan to serve foreign visitors. Despite the youth's reported confession that the killing was motivated by the cartoons, there were also suggestions Fr. Santoro may have been killed for missionary work, usually viewed with suspicion in Turkey, or by the mafia for helping prostitutes from the former Soviet Union, who are usually brought to Turkey via Trabzon. Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar in Anatolia, said that Christians in the region live amid hostility in an overwhelmingly Muslim community. Some Christians questioned whether the killing was an isolated act, or part of an orchestrated anti-Christian campaign.
Some analysts have even suggested Fr. Santoro's murder and February's escalation of violence across the Muslim world marked the beginning of the much-theorised 'clash of civilisations'. Church officials were quick to caution against such a hypothesis. In remarks to the Italian daily La Repubblica, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said that Fr. Santoro stood in the long line of martyrs who have died for the faith. The Spanish cardinal said, 'This has always happened, and unfortunately this will happen again. Despite these tragedies, missionaries continue to proclaim the Word of Christ, with the sentiments of peace, love and pardon - pardon which ought to be given to the assassin of Father Andrea.'
Calling Fr. Santoro an 'esteemed and zealous priest' and a 'courageous witness of the Gospel of Charity', Benedict XVI prayed that the missionary priest's blood would become 'a seed of hope in building authentic fraternity among peoples'. The governor of Istanbul and the city's mufti - its top Muslim religious official - were at the airport to pay tribute as Fr. Santoro's body was flown from Istanbul to Rome for the funeral, which was held on February 10.
Speaking at his weekly audience two days before the funeral, the Pope paid tribute to Fr. Santoro, praying that 'the sacrifice of his life may contribute to dialogue between religious and peace among peoples'. The Pope's words elicited a sustained standing ovation from several thousand people in the Paul VI audience hall.
During the funeral service, Italy's most senior cardinal said the priest should be put on the road to sainthood. 'I am convinced that Father Andrea's sacrifice has all the elements needed to make him a Christian martyr,' said Cardinal Camillo Ruini, the president of the Italian bishops' conference.
His words prompted prolonged applause from hundreds of mourners gathered in
the Basilica of St. John's in Lateran. Fr. Santoro is the first Roman priest to be martyred in the 21st century, and his death had a huge impact in Italy.

Turkey - bridge or barrier?

Fr. Santoro's murder drew strong condemnation from the Ankara government and triggered public outrage in Turkey, which sees itself as a bridge between East and West, and takes pride in its record of inter-religious tolerance.
Although overwhelmingly Muslim, the country has a strictly secular system and is seeking to join the European Union. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded to the murder by urging Muslims in Turkey and around the world to show restraint over the cartoons, which he described as a 'trap' aimed at portraying Islam as violent.
'Neither Turkey nor the Muslim world should fall into this trap,' he said. 'The Muslim world must demonstrate that it has the reason, the common sense and the maturity to fend off such provocations.' Erdogan insisted that Turkey would remain a land of religious tolerance and pursue its EU membership bid, which he described as 'an antidote' to confrontation between East and West.
Christians have often complained of discrimination in Turkey, most of whose 67 million inhabitants are Sunni Muslims. Turkey's 32,000-member Catholic minority has been demanding juridical recognition since 1970. Benedict XVI's November visit, the third by a Pope to Turkey after Paul VI in 1967 and John Paul II in 1979, will bolster the local Catholic community. It is also expected to strengthen Catholic ties with the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I of Constantinople, who wields direct jurisdiction over 3.5m Orthodox Christians in Turkey, Crete, the Aegean Islands and Mount Athos, but is also recognised as spiritual leader of the world's 300 million-strong Orthodox community. Turkey has been careful to avoid any move that may imply recognition of Bartholomew's ecumenical title. Ankara treats the Patriarch only as the spiritual leader of some 2,000 Orthodox Greeks in Turkey.

Religious freedom questioned

Turkey's Islamic-led government has pledged to safeguard religious freedom as a precondition for EU admission in 2015. But Christian groups have expressed scepticism about human rights legislation and Penal Code amendments. Within a month of starting EU accession talks last October, Turkey was criticized by the European Commission for its lack of religious freedom for Catholics and other Christian minorities. In its 2005 Progress Report, the Commission warned that the country's Christian communities could disappear within a generation.
'The current legal framework still does not recognise the right of religious communities to establish associations with legal personality to promote and practise their religions,' said the report. 'In practice, non-Muslim religious communities continue to encounter significant problems: they face restricted property rights and interference in managing their foundations, and they are not allowed to train clergy.'
Stating that 'only very limited progress' had been noted on religious rights, the report said that non-Turkish Christian clergy continued to experience difficulties with respect to the granting and renewal of visas and residence and work permits.
'Religious foundations remain subject to the Directorate General for Foundations, which is able to dissolve them, seize their properties and dismiss their trustees without a judicial decision, and intervene in the management of their assets,' said the report.

The Pope's opinion?

The Vatican's official position on Turkey's accession to the EU is that it is not necessarily opposed, provided that religious freedom is guaranteed for the country's minorities and Europe's Christian roots are formally acknowledged.
However, while he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Pope expressed his opposition to Turkey's potential EU membership, describing it as 'a grave error'. He told France's Le Figaro daily less than two years ago that Turkish membership would 'contradict Europe's Christian character'. Linking the two would be a mistake, he added, benefiting economics at the expense of cultural richness. Driving home this sense of Turkish otherness, the Cardinal referred to the Ottoman Empire's incursions into the heart of Europe in past centuries. Turkey should be a 'protagonist of a culture possessing its own identity, but in communion with the great humanist values that all countries must recognise,' he said. The German-born cardinal added that it should act as a democratic example to Arab nations, but that such a role would not prevent a close and amicable alliance with the EU against all forms of fundamentalism.

The Turkish response

The Vatican has distanced itself from the Pope's past remarks, saying he was expressing his personal opinion. But the comments struck a dissonant chord with Turkey's Catholics. Fr. George Marovich, spokesman for the Turkish bishops' conference, said, 'Catholics are not bound to these views about Turkey's EU membership'. Fr. Marovich added that Pope John XXIII was 'very fond' of Turkey, having worked in the country for 10 years before being elected Pope.
An editorial in The New York Times at the time of the then Cardinal Ratzinger's comments on Turkey said the EU should consider the political benefits of Ankara's membership, rather than the Cardinal's opinions, in its decision-making process. The editorial argued that the debate surrounding Turkey's possible accession would have been better served had the Cardinal emphasized 'the positive potential in combining the best Christian tradition of charity and the best Muslim tradition of social justice.'
Turkey has been westernising itself at least since the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, its supporters argue, and the prospect of membership of the EU has reinforced and accelerated that process. Critics of the then Cardinal Ratzinger's remarks argue it was a complete misreading of history to see the kind of Islam Turkey represents as being outside the flow of European and Christian history. Muslim scholars helped Europe rescue itself from the Dark Ages; at its peak the Islamic civilisation of the Iberian Peninsula was ahead of anything Christians had achieved. Geographically, modern Turkey contains much that was once the heartland of early Christianity, including the city of Constantinople, as well as Tarsus, birthplace of St. Paul. Proponents of Turkey's EU accession bid suggest that Turkey's significance lies not so much in its being a bridge to the Islamic world, but as a model for it. Benedict XVI's November visit will give an opportunity to see whether his opinions on the country have changed since his elevation to the seat of St. Peter.