Visit of Pope Francis to Turkey Tests Vatican on Islam, Two weeks after his election, Pope Francis washed the feet of 12 people at a juvenile detention center in Rome for the annual Holy Thursday ritual. Among those chosen for the rite was a Muslim girl.
The image of the kneeling 76-year-old pope washing and kissing her feet sent an unequivocal message: After the tensions that characterized the reign of Pope Benedict XVI—peaking with a 2006 speech that linked Islam to violence—the new pontiff intended to reset Catholicism’s relations with the Muslim world.
Just over a year and a half later, the limits of the Vatican’s efforts are being tested, as the Holy See steps up its call for Muslim leaders to do more to denounce Islamic State atrocities against religious minorities and to guarantee religious freedom to Christians.
The pope’s visit this weekend to Turkey—where once-robust Christian communities have dwindled and a Muslim majority is now staking a greater claim to the public sphere—provides a crucial example.
The trip is the pope’s fourth to a Muslim-majority country, but Turkey, where 99% of its 82 million citizens are Muslim, is by far the biggest. During the three-day trip, Pope Francis will visit Ankara and Istanbul, meeting Muslim and Orthodox Christian leaders, as well as top Turkish politicians including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He will also visit the 17th-century Blue Mosque, Istanbul’s main mosque, and the Hagia Sophia, an iconic Istanbul landmark that is also a clear symbol of the challenges he faces. Now a museum, it was for centuries an Eastern Orthodox cathedral before being transformed into a mosque. Some Muslim leaders are calling for it to be turned back into a mosque, a possibility that has alarmed Turkish Christians.
Since his election, the pope has extended regular gestures of goodwill to the Muslim world. He included an imam in his personal entourage during his Middle East trip. He chose Albania, a Muslim-majority country, for his first visit to a European country outside Italy and sent a message of esteem to Muslims to mark the end of Ramadan. In a lengthy manifesto for his papacy, he wrote that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Quran are opposed to every form of violence.”
Francis is a man of dialogue and wants to open a new page with the Islamic world,” says Mohammad Sammak, secretary-general of the National Committee for Christian-Muslim Dialogue in Lebanon. “He has a very positive image all over the Arab world.”
While that image serves better relations, it also puts the pope under pressure to use the capital he has earned. The plight of Christians “demands a clear and courageous stance on the part of religious leaders, especially Muslims,” said the Vatican in August. Otherwise, “what credibility would remain to the interreligious dialogue patiently pursued in recent years?”
Turkey, long a bridge between East and West, has sought to burnish its credentials as a model of reconciliation amid sectarian strife at its borders. It welcomed more than 1.5 million refugees from Iraq and Syria. And Mr. Erdogan, a pious Muslim, has forged an Islamic-infused democracy that he offers as a model—one the pope may choose to exalt.
The president’s party “is essentially an Islamic party in power in an Islamic country,” says Maurizio Albahari, a professor at the University of Notre Dame, and the Church could find common cause with a government that is championing a stronger role for religion in the public sphere.
But within Turkey, Christians complain that they are discriminated against, and some critics say Mr. Erdogan has failed to condemn atrocities against Christians by Islamic State strongly enough.
The head of the Diyanet, the government’s religious affairs body, rejects that argument, saying Europe hasn’t done enough to speak out against anti-Muslim sentiment. In September, Mehmet Gormez said that resolution of tensions between Christians and Muslims “doesn’t happen through things like washing a young girl’s feet or arranging interfaith football games.”
Some say the pope may tread lightly in raising the problems with Muslim leaders. In 2011, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which is considered the leading center of Sunni Islamic teaching, broke relations with the Vatican, ending an important source of Muslim-Christian dialogue, after Pope Benedict called for greater protection of Christians in Egypt following an attack on a Coptic cathedral. Al-Azhar cited the comments as “unacceptable interference in Egypt’s affairs.”
“Pushing leaders may create the opposite result” from what the pope wants, says Father Fadi Daou, head of Adyan, a Beirut-based center for interreligious studies. “Muslim leaders won’t like to react under pressure of a Christian leader.”
Pope Francis has championed dialogue with other Christian faiths, choosing to push aside past differences to work together. Christian groups want him to address the still-simmering tensions Ankara has with churches in Turkey, whose Christian population dwindled in the early 20th century with the forced exodus of Greek and Armenians and killings of millions of Armenians.
Christian leaders say they face discrimination and their churches are falling into disrepair because authorities deny them permission to refurbish or reconstruct them. The Halki Seminary, Turkey’s only Greek Orthodox seminary, was shut down in 1971, a high-profile example of a wave of government confiscation of Christian buildings. The government has promised to reopen it, but so far it hasn’t done so.
And Turkish law says the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual head of the Orthodox Church, must be a Turkish citizen, a rule viewed as harassment by Greek Orthodox Christians, who lack a seminary in Turkey to train new priests.
In a 2010 television interview, the current patriarch, Bartholomew, said he felt “crucified” by discriminatory Turkish laws.
“Turkish politics is a witches’ brew that has made it impossible for minority religious communities there,” said George Demacopoulos of Fordham University. “It’s like the Christians in Iraq. They’ve all left.”
Prof. Mehmet Paçaci, Turkey’s ambassador to the Holy See and former head of international affairs for the Diyanet, said properties can now be returned “with just a single petition” and the reopening of Halki is in the works. “The government pays much more attention to religious freedom and rights,” he told a briefing of journalists in Rome.
Still, some Orthodox leaders are likely to push the pope on these topics when they meet this weekend.
“There is a new Islamicization happening in Turkey after a long history of secularism,” says Habib Ephrem, head of the Union of Lebanese Christian Leagues. “We are now slowly going into an Islamic state and Erdogan is the new sultan. If the pope doesn’t talk about diversity within Turkey, why does he go at all? To back the regime?”
