SILENT LITTLE CHURCHES IN THE LAND OF ST. PAUL
by Geries Othman

AsiaNews.it
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Nov 26 2008
Italy

For many pilgrims in Turkey, the Pauline Year is an opportunity to
find in Tarsus, Antioch, and Ephesus the stones of an ancient past,
and the laborious present of a Christian community quenched to a
glimmer and marginalized by secularism and by Islam. But they are
also a small seed, where it is possible to discover the very mission
of St. Paul, unity and charity.

Ankara (AsiaNews) – Since last June, Turkey has seen a constant flow
of faithful from various countries around the world: Italy, Germany,
Spain, and France, and also from Latin America, Korea, and even
Japan. The many pilgrims want to walk in the "footsteps of St. Paul,"
revisiting the places where the Apostle – the 2,000th anniversary of
whose birth is being celebrated this year – was born, lived, and fought
and suffered for the Christian communities that had just arisen. Not
a day goes by without groups of the faithful passing through Tarsus,
Antioch, Ephesus. But too often the eyes of these pilgrims see nothing
but stones in the shadow of the many minarets, so that they go home
with a strong sense of dismay, if not the conviction that there are
no more Christians in Turkey, but only and exclusively Muslims.

In November of 1939, Angelo Roncalli (who would become Pope John XXIII)
was the apostolic delegate in Istanbul. In his "Journey of a Soul,"
he wrote: "There is very little left of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus
Christ here in Turkey. Just relics and seeds." Nothing seems to have
changed over the past 70 years: the eyes of the pilgrims see only
the stones, as glorious as these are, of a past that is no more;
churches transformed into museums, mosques, schools, or libraries.

A Church reduced to silence The dismay is all the more profound if
one considers that until a century ago, Turkey had the most numerous
Christian community in the Middle East. Today it is the smallest. Of
the approximately 2 million Christians at the beginning of the 20th
century, in fact, only 150 thousand have remained, almost all of them
concentrated in the large cities of Istanbul, Smyrna, and Mersin,
the rest of them scattered in Anatolia in tiny communities. Almost
half of them are members of the Armenian Apostolic Church, then come
the Catholic communities, about 30,000 in all, mainly Latin, but
also Armenian, Syrian, and Chaldean. There are 20,000 Protestants of
various denominations, followed by Syro-Orthodox, about 10,000, only
a tenth of the number present a century ago in the southern region of
Tur Abdin. The Greek Orthodox of Bartholomew I have been reduced to
about 5,000. Among the 70 million inhabitants, then, the Christians
represent a tiny number, almost ridiculous, less than one percent. It
is a Church that is truly smaller than the smallest of seeds.

The disappearance of the Church has gone hand in hand with the
reduction of all the beneficial institutions managed by the Church
(hospitals, hospices, schools), both because of the steady loss
of personnel and because of the economic burdens imposed by the
state. There are many obstacles that make life difficult for the
Christian communities in a country that, in spite of everything,
describes itself as secular: the absence of legal personality;
the restriction of property rights; interference in the management
of foundations; the impossibility of forming the clergy; the
police surveillance directed at Christians. Turkish legislation is
complicating life for the Catholic Church. A statute has still not
been found that would permit it to have legal existence, and therefore
a voice in society. And as for religious freedom, if it is true that
a Turkish directive in December of 2003 authorized the changing of
religious identity, or the passage from one confession to another,
on the basis of a simple declaration, the reality of the facts
demonstrates that social and media pressure has much greater power.

It’s enough to think of Ankara. The capital of the country should
be the stronghold of state secularism, and yet the 250 Christian
families who are there, strewn among the six million inhabitants,
feel constrained to give non-Christian names to their own children,
so that they are not made fun of in school and are not discriminated
against in the workplace. They conceal their faith even in their own
homes, and do not display on the wall any sacred images or symbols
that could disturb peaceful coexistence with their neighbors. They
suffer every time they go to the cemetery, seeing the tombs of their
loved ones repeatedly profaned, the crosses destroyed, the gravestones
defaced. They feel themselves scrutinized from head to foot by the
plainclothes policemen at the entrance of the church, when they just
want to go inside to light a candle. So these are Christian communities
reduced to silence, ass Cardinal Roncalli wrote so clearly: "A modest
minority that lives at the surface of a vast world with which we
have only superficial contact." A Church that limps, that struggles,
a church in fear.

Growing in unity Life is not easy for those in Turkey who proclaim
themselves to be Christian, and it is precisely for these faithful
that, on the occasion of the 2,000th anniversary of St. Paul, the TEC
(Turkish Episcopal Conference) published a pastoral letter with the
purpose of reawakening within the Christians of Turkey their awareness
of their own identity, and of giving them courage and openness. Luigi
Padovese, bishop of Anatolia and president of the TEC, expresses his
hopes: " I expect that the faithful living in Turkey, by reading the
writings and life of St. Paul, will be able to reinforce and love their
Christian identity more. The Pauline letters show the great effort
confronted by the saint in order to bring the message of Christ to
the most inaccessible areas of Turkey. If one thinks of the dangers,
the enormous spiritual strength that animated the apostolate of Paul in
his travels from one region to another, one cannot help but be struck,
undergoing a genuine in interior transformation. My greatest desire is
to see in the pilgrim who comes to Anatolia, and the Christians present
here, the awareness that Christianity is not only a geographical or
hereditary factor, but also a mission, a commitment, a difficulty. By
being aware of this, a stronger Christian matures."

But how is it possible not to feel isolated, lost, overwhelmed, in
a world that unjustly considers you a foreign element, obnoxious,
burdensome, threatening?

They are fortunate who are able to rely upon a community, fortunate
to find an open church to which they can go and in which they
can experience the sense of belonging that helps them to move
forward. This is why the pastors of the Church insist on unity. Again
in the pastoral letter of the TEC from last year, we read: "before
being Catholic, Orthodox, Syrian, Armenian, Chaldean, Protestant,
we are Christians. This is the basis of our duty to be witnesses. We
must not allow our differences to generate mistrust and harm the unity
of faith; we must not permit those who are not Christian to withdraw
from Christ on account of our divisions."

And it is precisely this that the Christians in Turkey are seeking to
live. In Antioch, Mersin, Smyrna, Trabzon, Istanbul, or Ankara, the
meager little group of faithful that gathers on Sunday in the city’s
only church – Orthodox, Armenian, Catholic, or Chaldean – pray, sing,
gather around the Eucharist from which they draw of the strength to
be Christians, and then, at the end of the Eucharistic celebration,
they have tea together, they chat a little, they reflect on their
faith and on their lives. They are tiny seeds destined to grow.

And now that Christmas is approaching, without any significant external
signs, they are organizing to decorate the church, to build the creche,
to prepare a Nativity play, to enrich midnight Mass with a choir,
to offer a banquet for the poorest, after the fasting during all of
Advent, according to Orthodox tradition. It is a dialogue of works,
a daily fraternity made up of simple gestures, which may be simple
and even banal, but make it easier to believe, to continue to hope
against all hope.
From: Baghdasarian