Nov. 26, 2006, 4:40PM
Turkey’s Christians await pope’s visit
By SUZAN FRASER Associated Press Writer
ANKARA, Turkey – Next door to a store selling artificial limbs in a
run-down area of Turkey’s capital, the Protestant church sits on the ground
floor of a dreary apartment block, with barred windows and kitchen chairs
for pews.
The 100-strong congregation of the Kurtulus Church, which is linked to the
U.S.-based International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, rents the space
because authorities have not responded to its request for land and a permit
to build a proper chapel.
When Pope Benedict XVI visits Turkey for four days starting Tuesday, he will
try to ease anger over his recent remarks linking Islam and violence. But he
is also expected to press the 99 percent Muslim country to give its
Christian community more rights. Some of those Christians are forced to
worship in so-called "apartment churches," and suffer prejudice,
discrimination, even assault.
"The pope will discuss the rights of the religious minority" with Turkish
officials, said Monsignor Luigi Padovese, the pope’s vicar in Anatolia. "In
a secular country, people must have the right to believe in whatever faith
they choose to believe."
The pastor of Kurtulus Church, the Rev. Ihsan Ozbek, sees an opening for
dialogue. "We face serious problems. Turkish citizens who converted to
Christianity, especially, face serious discrimination and violence," he
said.
The windows of his makeshift chapel have twice been smashed by suspected
Turkish nationalists, reflecting a widely held conviction that conversion is
treason and that Christian clergy are missionaries or spies for Western
powers.
Of Turkey’s 70 million people, some 65,000 are Armenian Orthodox Christians,
20,000 are Roman Catholic, and 3,500 are Protestant, mostly converts from
Islam. Another 2,000 are Greek Orthodox and 23,000 are Jewish.
The shrunken Christian presence belies the church’s deep roots in latter-day
Turkey.
Constantinople _ modern-day Istanbul _ was the Christian Byzantine capital
for more than 1,000 years until it fell to Muslim forces in 1453 and became
the seat of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
St. John the Apostle is said to have brought the Virgin Mary to Ephesus, 400
miles southwest of Istanbul, where she is believed to have spent her final
years, while St. Paul traveled through much of modern-day Turkey on his
missionary journeys.
Iznik is the former Nicea, where early Christian doctrine was formulated in
325 A.D. All seven major churches of early Christianity, mentioned in The
New Testament, are in present-day Turkey. The pope will make a pilgrimage to
one of them at Ephesus.
Today, Istanbul remains the center of Orthodoxy and the seat of Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew I, considered "the first among equals" among the
Orthodox leadership.
But membership is dwindling. The sole seminary training Greek Orthodox monks
was ordered closed in 1971, and no alternative site has been granted.
Turkish law also makes it impossible to import non-Turkish seminarians, and
requires that the patriarchs be Turkish citizens, severely reducing the pool
of candidates to succeed 66-year-old Bartholomew.
The Armenian Orthodox community’s seminary is also closed, confronting it
with the same challenge, while Greek and Armenian communities are struggling
to recover property that the state confiscated in the 1970s.
Turkey wants to join the European Union, which is pressing it for greater
tolerance. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted government
has taken some steps toward change, amending laws to allow religious
minorities to recover some property. The government has also indicated
willingness to reopen the minority seminaries, but has failed to find a
formula that conforms with the country’s secular laws.
Even though Turkey is secular and Turks are considered moderately religious,
authorities often report students who attend Christian meetings to their
families to prevent possible conversions, and proselytizers are detained and
extradited.
The distrust is so deep that non-Muslims are barred from the police force
and military.
In February, a Turkish teenager shot dead a Catholic priest, Rev. Andrea
Santoro, as he knelt in prayer in his church in the Black Sea port of
Trabzon. The attack was believed linked to widespread anger in the Islamic
world over the publication in European newspapers of caricatures of the
Prophet Muhammad. Two other Catholic priests were attacked this year.