It takes a lot of faith to believe that any good will come of
Pope Benedict's visit to Turkey -- but of course, Benedict has
that in spades.
The media will naturally enough focus on the trip's possible
impact on the future of Muslim-Christian relations. After the
violent reaction to Pope Benedict's speech at the University of
Regensburg, in Germany, last September, a lot of us Catholics
will simply be holding our breath and saying a few extra Hail
Marys. ("I have a bad feeling about this trip," a friend of mine
muttered darkly, speaking for a lot of us.)
But for Benedict, the highlight and purpose of his trip lies
elsewhere, especially in the historic meeting with Bartholomew I,
the patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual head of the
Orthodox Church. Six centuries after the fall of Constantinople,
Patriarch Bartholomew's flock is tiny, perhaps just 2,000 people.
But just before taking off, Pope Benedict spoke with reporters on
the plane, according to National Catholic Reporter's John Allen:
"Numbers don't really count," Benedict said. "It's the symbolic
and historical weight (of the office) that matters."
Bringing together "the two sister churches of Rome and
Constantinople," the pope said, is a "very important moment in
the search for Christian unity." It is, he acknowledged, a
symbolic encounter, but one that "is not just empty, but is full
of reality."
One of the realities the pope seeks to call to our attention
is how utterly oppressed by the Turkish government this tiny
flock of Orthodox Christians remains.
Too many powerful people, when they talk about the importance
of defending civil liberties, really mean (as Kevin J. Hasson of
the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty puts it) "their favorite
civil liberties." Which may be one reason why, although I was
acutely aware that the government of Turkey faced sharp criticism
from the West for putting novelists, historians, journalists --
and even, in one case, an archeologist with novel theories about
the uses to which ancient Sumerians put headscarves -- on trial,
I had not heard before of the disgraceful state of dhimmitude to
which the patriarch of Constantinople and his church remain
subject to this day.