ISTANBUL — Turkey praised Pope Benedict XVI yesterday for dropping his opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union.
“It started beautifully,” said the mass circulation Hurriyet newspaper, “the pope told the world from Ankara that Islam was a religion of peace.”
Turkey’s other biggest daily Milliyet concurred.
“This trip is important for Turkey’s EU membership. This is a big warning for politicians who think the EU is a Christian club,” it said.
Benedict on Tuesday began a delicate four-day trip to this Muslim NATO nation by meeting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan who afterward quoted the conservative German pope as having dropped his previous well-known hostility to Turkey becoming an EU member. The Vatican did not confirm specifically the Turkish leader’s remarks. However, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said the pope “sees positively and encourages the passage of dialogue for the inserting of Turkey in the EU, on the basis of specific common values.”
Benedict began the second day of his remarkable first official trip to a Muslim country yesterday by celebrating a Mass close to the ancient city of Ephesus near the Aegean coast in a ceremony for Turkey’s embattled Roman Catholic community. The service was held next to the ruins of a house where the Virgin Mary is thought by some scholars to have spent her last years after she was taken there by St. John the Apostle.
“I have wanted to convey my personal love and spiritual closeness … to the Christian community here in Turkey, a small minority which faces many challenges and difficulties daily,” the pope told an intimate congregation of just 250.
He also honored the Rev. Andrea Santoro, an Italian priest who was fatally shot by a Turkish teenager in February in his church in the Black Sea port of Trabzon. The attack was thought to be linked to Muslim outrage over the publication of caricatures of the prophet Muhammad in European newspapers. Two other Catholic priests were attacked in Turkey this year.
Diplomats and commentators say in the first two days of his visit the pope has gone a long way toward reopening dialogue between Christians and Muslims who were angered over a speech he made in September in which he spoke of a medieval text that linked Islam and violence.
On Tuesday, in what some took as a rebuke of radical Islamists, Benedict urged religious leaders of all faiths to “utterly refuse” to support any form of violence in the name of their creeds.
The pope’s schedule yesterday was highlighted by a meeting with Greek Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians. The two major branches of Christianity represented by Bartholomew and Benedict split in 1054 over differences on the power of the papacy. The pope’s deepening ties with Bartholomew, … called the “first among equals” of the Orthodox leaders — is watched with suspicion by authorities in Turkey as a potential challenge to state-imposed limits on Christian minorities and others. Benedict has declared a “fundamental” commitment to heal rifts between the two ancient branches of Christianity.
At Bartholomew’s walled compound in Istanbul, the pope stood amid black-robed Orthodox clerics and urged both sides “to work for full unity of Catholics and Orthodox.”
The Vatican yesterday dismissed a statement reportedly issued in Iraq by al Qaeda denouncing the pope’s visit to Turkey as part of a “crusader campaign” against Islam.
“Neither the pope nor his entourage are worried” by the statement on a Web site, said Father Lombardi. Turkey’s far-right Gray Wolves movement called a demonstration in Istanbul to be held today against the pope’s visit but it was not clear whether authorities would allow the protest to go ahead.
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