As communism was to Pope John Paul II, so radical Islam is to Pope Benedict XVI--the most pressing geopolitical problem of his time, of course, but also something more: a test of whether Catholicism is going to buttress the moral, political, and intellectual struggle against a violent and tyrannical ideology, or whether the Church is going to go squishy.
At first glance, the pope's four-day trip to Turkey last week makes the answer look like squish. Newspapers around the globe announced that the pope had barely gotten off the plane in Ankara before he told Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he now considers Islam "a religion of peace." What's more, he is reported to have said that the Vatican will no longer oppose the admission of Turkey to the European Union.
Off he then went to a lecture hall, sitting quietly and apparently undisturbed while Ali Bardakoglu, the head of the Turkish government's religious-affairs office, introduced him by denouncing those who did not understand the "vast tolerance of Islam"--a tolerance that wears dangerously thin, Bardakoglu warned, when people attempt to "demonstrate the superiority of their own beliefs" with discussions of "the theology of religions" or claim that Islam "was spread over the world by swords."
Bardakoglu's words were widely understood to be what, in fact, they were: an open continuation of the attack on Benedict XVI for his negative depiction of Islam in his September 12 lecture at Regensburg, Germany. "Pope, don't make a mistake, don't wear out our patience," Islamic activists
shouted when they occupied the Haghia Sophia to protest Benedict's visit. And in response to Bardakoglu's undiplomatic ambush, the pope read a diplomatic speech, all about how Christians and Muslims are brothers who "believe and confess to one God, even if in different ways." Indeed, he added, Turkey "is very kind to Christians," and he quoted John Paul II on the need for Christians and Muslims to "develop the spiritual bonds that unite them."
By the time he was photographed praying in a mosque and waving a Turkish flag, Benedict seemed to have managed little but to make nice and surrender on every point--all to undo the damage done when his Regensburg address was followed by anti-Catholic and anti-Western riots across the Islamic world. "Pope Visit Eclipses Image of Anti-Turk Islamophobe," ran a typical headline as the papal trip to Turkey wound down to its dull conclusion.
Well, maybe. It's difficult to say what else Benedict should have done. The journey to Turkey was intended to be about Eastern Orthodoxy, not Islam. From the genocidal destruction of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I, to the enforced atheism of the Soviets, and down to the rise of Islamic nationalism, the last hundred years have been brutal to Christianity in the East. The ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople--Bartholomew I, bishop of the highest and most famous see in the Orthodox Church--has only 3,000 people left in his diocese. His seminary has been padlocked by the government since 1971, his few converts are subject to prosecution under Article 301 of the penal code that prohibits "insulting Turkishness," and his flock has been squeezed into a small corner of Istanbul by the official secularism of the Turkish government on one side and radical Islam on the other.
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