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  Tolerance in Turkey: Catholics Want to Reclaim St. Paul's Birthplace

Tolerance in Turkey Catholics Want to Reclaim St. Paul's Birthplace

By Peter Wensierski

Part 2: Fears of a Christian 'Mission'

Turkey's 33,000 Catholics are a negligibly small group compared with the country's roughly 73 million Muslims. The headquarters of the German Bishops' Conference regularly receives horrifying reports of how they are treated. This has helped shape the Catholic Church's current position that Turkey is not yet "ready to be part of Europe."

Many Catholics meet only in private homes, because they feel persecuted and discriminated against. Even in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul, Christians cannot openly practice their faith everywhere. One prayer room was set up in a former industrial building -- naturally without visible identifiers like a cross or a church tower. The training of clergy and lay ministers is impossible; monasteries and seminaries were closed years ago. Even foreign personnel are generally not allowed to make up for staffing shortfalls.

Admittedly, the German Protestant pastor who attends to the spiritual needs of tourists from Germany and the more than 10,000 German pensioners who have settled on Turkey's southern coast is not persecuted. However, he is merely tolerated, because he is a diplomatic member of the consulate general.

One of the fundamental problems Christians face in the country is their completely tentative status. Unlike Germany, Turkey does not recognize churches and parishes as legal entities. Ownership rights to old churches and other buildings are routinely challenged in Turkey.

"Hundreds of churches and parish halls were seized, thereby depriving Christians of their ability to congregate," complains Otmar Oehring, head of the human rights office of the international Catholic mission society Missio. Only a few months ago, Turkey's supreme appellate court deprived the ecumenical patriarch of his title, to which he has been entitled for centuries.

The difficult situation of religious minorities is always brought to the attention of the international community when violent crimes occur. In February 2006, a Catholic priest was murdered in Trabzon, followed by the killing of a Christian journalist in Istanbul in January 2007 and of three employees of a Christian publishing company in Malatya in April. A monk was kidnapped in Midyat in November 2007, a priest was wounded in a knife attack in Izmir in December 2007, and a pastor in Antalya barely escaped being murdered when, in January of this year, Turkish intelligence uncovered a plot to kill him.

There is no evidence that anti-Christian propaganda led to these acts of violence, but the mood in Turkish society is being systematically poisoned against the minority religion. Although the number of Christians in the country is a tiny fraction of what it once was, Islamist and nationalist forces stoke completely exaggerated fears of a "Christian mission."

The Turkish intelligence service and the military, as well as police intelligence units, spread horrific stories about Christians in Turkey. For example, the armed forces published a report titled "Missionary Activities in Our Country and in the World," in which they warn against the "dangers posed by converts." Governors, heads of intelligence and education directors in the provinces have been called upon to take joint action against "proselytizing Christians."

Ironically, the Turkish Interior Ministry has registered a ridiculously small number of converts from Islam to Christianity: a mere 344 in the last seven years. For this reason, Turkish papers like the liberal daily Sabah are critical of the efforts to incite hysteria. "A lie is being spread about missionaries," the paper wrote in an editorial. "The public is being goaded to adopt hate-filled, anti-Christian positions. All of this is experienced in this country, and sometime, when the time comes, someone will believe the fairy tale that 'these are the enemies among us,' and kill three people."

Liberal voices like Sabah's allow Padovese to be cautiously optimistic. He was especially pleased to read an editorial by the editor-in-chief of the leading secular daily Hürriyet, Ertugrul Özkök, who wrote: "Turks in Germany have built more than 3,000 mosques, and we cannot even tolerate a few churches and a dozen missionaries. Where is our civilization?"

Last week, Padovese detected the first signs of a possible easing of tensions: The local authorities in Tarsus assembled a commission to discuss the request for a Christian center in the birthplace of St. Paul. In other words, the Turks had put together a working group, a notion that elicits a smile from the bishop. "The Turks and the Germans are similar in that respect at least," he says.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan