Turkish realities, Western necessities

Fantastic. Even in “democratic,” “modern,” “de-sharia-fied” Turkey, Christians are still living under the age-old law of the dhimma. They can’t freely express Christianity in public, they can’t build or fix churches, and the Catholic Church only survives in a shadowy, extra-legal existence, as a protectorate of foreign embassies. Why have we never heard of this before? Unbelievable. Randall Parker quotes the L.A. Times:

The Roman Catholic Church is not legally recognized in Turkey. It functions largely attached to foreign embassies; its priests do not wear their collars in public.

Most Christians in Turkey are of the Armenian, Greek and other Orthodox denominations, and although most of these are recognized in the Turkish Constitution as minority communities, they face severe restrictions on property ownership and cannot build places of worship or run seminaries to train their clerics.

And Europe, urged on by the U.S. president, is thinking of making Turkey part of the borderless EU. And the pope, whom I’ve basically given up on as a leader and defender of the West, is visiting that country and honoring it. Now straighten me out on this one. The pope is against the inclusion of Turkey in the EU, right? So why in blazes does he choose this moment to visit Turkey? Is it that perverse Catholic—i.e. universal—thing of always wanting to maintain good relations with everyone, including enemies?

* * *

Shortly after posting the above, I was told by a reader that “The Pope is in Turkey to meet with leaders of the Orthodox Church. The Turks are ignoring this aspect of his visit. But the Pope is trying to improve relations between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.”

So I did a little searching and—what a world—found this in Christianity Today:

The Pope will visit Turkey from 28 November to 1 December, and Patriarch Bartholomew I [the head of the Orthodox Christian church] has said that this will be a great opportunity for Turkey to show why it should be accepted into the European Union, something it has been trying to put in place for a number of years.

The Orthodox spiritual head did explain that he intends to tell the Pope that ”it is not wrong for Turkey to become a member of the EU as a Muslim country because it would bring mutual richness. The EU should not remain as a Christian club.”

So, the pope is not just going to Turkey to improve relations with the Muslim Turks; he’s going there to meet with the Orthodox patriarch and improve relations with the Orthodox Christians. But what does the Orthodox patriarch want the pope to do? He wants the pope to be persuaded that he should support the inclusion of Turkey into the EU. It thus turns out that the Christian leader of Turkey is another dhimmi, eagerly helping along the Muslim conquest of the West. He and Joseph (“I respect the Holy Koran”) Ratzinger should have a lot to talk about.

- end of initial entry -

David H. writes:

Speaking as an Orthodox Christian, the actions of Bartholomew I are an affront to my religion and an insult to the countless Orthodox Christians murdered by Islamic invaders, terrorists, SS members (many of them being Bosnian Moslems) and mujahideen (Taliban especially, in the recent wars). There was a time when Orthodox priests and clergy were willing to die for the Church, not sell it out for favors and coin. There was a time when Orthodox Christians rose and fought the jihad—these were the hajduks, the. And now we have this … dhimmi. Oh where have you gone, Vlad Tepes?

Andrew Bostom writes:

Don’t underestimate the role of raw fear in all this…The Pope fears for Christain communities in Islamdom, but he also fears the Muslim populations poised to impose their will in Europe…The Regensburg speech was an anomaly…He doesn’t have the stomach for this fight..Perhaps he knows his own flock is largely unpreprared to wage this struggle as well, and for that he cannot be blamed..Yes he’s a weak leader, but why try to lead those who show no signs of responding to such leadership? Remember how he was vilified within his own hieracrhy for the Regensburg speech? A few bishops spoke out in support and that was it. And what of the masses of Catholics? What did they really do to show they understood the threat of Islam, and were prepared to combat it? Nothing I am afraid. He’s angling for a soft landing, which of course is completely delusional.

Peter G. writes:

Since 1453, Muslims have steadily exterminated its residual population of Christendom at 14 percent per century reducing it to less than .2 percent at present. It has the largest army bordering Europe, with a convenient “bridge,” its toe hold into Greece. Being part of NATO they are well armed and familiar with any tactics it would use to defend itself from attack. Rather ironic, the enemy from within. A historically relentless killing machine of Christians has all of Europe’s plans for self defense. When they flip the jihad switch to on, what will Europeans do? Darius and Saladin would be proud.

Paul Cella writes:

A friend of mine, an Orthodox convert from Catholicism, is travelling with Pope Benedict in Turkey. He has a established a website that touches on a lot of traditionalist themes and fills in many gaps in the story of Eastern Christendom, which the West has simply forgotten. See, for example, this. In my view, there can be no real recovery of a historical Christian consciousness, in the context of the pressing threat from Islam, unless we are prepared to embrace the neglected tragedy of Byzantium, which stood, virtually alone at times, against the armies of the Crescent for a thousand years.

LA replies:

Though I have attended Eastern rite services, I know embarrassingly little about Orthodox Christendom, and, personally, I am not particularly interested in it. I say this not to justify my ignorance and lack of interest, but to underscore the age-old problem of Christian disunity to which Mr. Cella refers. The fact is that Western Christians have often not much liked Eastern Christianity, have not “identified” with it, have seen it as alien. Therefore they have often not sided with it against Islam, with disastrous results. The most famous historical instance is when Western Christian Crusaders, known to history as Latins, sacked and ruined Constantinople in the 13th century, permanently weakening it and leading to the ultimate defeat of Constantinople two centuries later. And I think someone recently mentioned at VFR that during the final Ottoman siege of Constantinople in the 15th century, the West offered almost no help to the Byzantines.

In a larger sense, over and over during the history of Islam we have seen that the West lost when it was internally divided, whether between the Orthodox Church and various Christian heresies such as the Monophysites; or between the Orthodox Church and Rome; or between the Roman Church and the Protestants; or between Christians and Jews. Didn’t some Jews welcome the Moslem conquest of Spain, seeing the Moslems as more tolerant than the Christians? Don’t some Jews today still carry a historic grudge against Christian Europe and so fail to defend Europe and America against Islam? Don’t many Christian and gentile Europeans today side with Muslim terrorists against Israel? And beyond the Christian-Jewish divide, there is the emerging secularist-theist divide, with more and more atheists openly desiring the destruction of Christianity and even forming organizations for that purpose.

The first idea arising from the above considerations is that, even if Western Christians don’t particularly like Eastern Christianity, they need to rise above themselves and find the Christian commonality that is there.

But the Jewish question and the secularist question show that it’s not just inter-Christian unity and identity that is needed, but a broader Western unity and identity. Which leads us to a central point of traditionalism. Western civilizational survival and recovery require Western civilizational consciousness. Christianity is of course central to the West, but is not the whole of it. Whatever our different backgrounds and beliefs, the key to our survival is an instinctive love for Western civilization and Western man. And of course the key to the current Western suicide has been the loss of that instinctive love for our historic civilization and peoplehood, indeed, a positive hatred for our civilization and an increasingly open desire to see it destroyed.

At the same time, as the discussion of the Eastern Christian problem shows, we cannot limit ourselves to the West. The Christian East is different from the Christian West, which is why Westerners fail to support Eastern Christians. But the two communities still have Christianity in common, and also have in common the Islamic mortal foe. So, in addition to Western civilizational consciousness, there must also be sufficient friendship and like-mindedness between Western and Eastern Christians to enable them to stand together against Islam.

And I would add that beyond the expanding circles of Western Christian identity, of Jewish-Christian-secular Western identity, and of the common Western Christian and Eastern Christian identity, there is a larger circle that includes all civilized non-Islamic societies with whom we need to ally, not of course to forget our mutual differences or to merge with them in any multicultural sense, but to have enough consciousness of the common Islamic threat to enable us to work with them for our common safety and survival.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 27, 2006 08:59 PM | Send