TURKEY’S CATHOLIC COMMUNITY, TINY BUT DIVERSE, AWAITS POPE’S VISIT
by Nicolas Cheviron
Agence France Presse — English
November 26, 2006 Sunday 2:24 AM GMT
In Aramaic, Italian or Tagalog, celebrating mass in the Latin,
Byzantine or Armenian rites, Turkey’s tiny but diverse community of
some 28,000 Catholics waits to meet Pope Benedict XVI next week.
Anna Schindler, a Filipina married to a German, is in charge of the
lottery that will allow a handful of faithful to attend the only
mass the pontiff will celebrate in Istanbul, at the Cathedral of the
Holy Spirit.
Of the 1,100 tickets available for event, no more than 700 will go to
members of Istanbul parishes and only 40 to those of the Holy Spirit;
the remainder are reserved for dignitaries on the protocol list.
"I already missed one papal visit — in the Philippines in 1969,"
said Anna, a housewife in a pink dress. "I hope I won’t miss this one."
Many members of the small Filipino community here, mostly domestic
helpers, will miss the mass because Friday is a regular working day
and they will be at their jobs, she said.
Anna is proud to belong to Istanbul’s main Catholic parish and is
part of a new breed that replaced the Levantines of old.
The Levantines were descendants of Italian traders who settled in
Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known, from the 9th century
onwards, when it was still the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
They had their heyday in the 19th century before gradually disappearing
after the modern republic was proclaimed in 1923.
"There is only a tiny handful of them left," said Father Giuseppe
Giorgis, a priest at Holy Spirit. "They are those who couldn’t leave
because of their work or their marriage, or simply because they had
nowhere else to go."
As the crucial link between the eastern and western components of
the Ottoman Empire, the Levantines grew rich over the centuries,
but most left when the republic ended the special privileges they
enjoyed under the Ottomans.
In addition to the handful of old timers, the parish these days is
composed mainly of a few "neo-Levantines" — Western businessmen in
suit and tie — and a growing African community that has made its
home in the notorious neighboring district of Tarlabasi.
The cathedral choir, which for the past two months has been practicing
the papal mass’s pentecostal — hence multilingual — repertoire,
is just as cosmopolitan.
It includes Greek Orthodox, Armenian Catholic and even two Muslim
singers — former divas of the Istanbul Opera whose love of hymns
has made them regulars of the Holy Spirit choir for the past 35 years.
"The key to it all," said one of them, Isin Guven, "is that God is
love. And this is a magnificent family."
Three other choirs will join the papal mass: One Austrian, one Armenian
Catholic and one Chaldean, representing not only the 700 local faithful
but a further 3,800 recently arrived as refugees from Iraq.
The Syriac Catholic Church’s 1,200 members in this country will not
field a choir, but will be represented by its Patriarchal Exarch here.
Mystery surrounds whether the dwindling last remnants of pre-Ottoman
Istanbul, the Byzantine Catholics, will be present to greet Benedict
XVI.
"I know they exist, because I met four or five of them," said Louis
Pelatre, the Vicar Apostolic of Istanbul.
But he could not say whether they would be on the cathedral square
on December 1 to greet the pope.