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**Gavur** · 04-06-2006, 11:27 AM

Two months on, Christians don�t want �normality� after Fr Santoro�s death

6 April, 2006
TURKEY

A Turkish Christian woman tells AsiaNews: even the bodyguards assigned to priests have been recalled. But his death, after the heartbreak, is reawakening the small Christian community.

Antioch (AsiaNews) � On Sunday, 5 February, in Trabzon � a Turkish city on the Black Sea � at the close of a day of protests and violence in the Islamic world because of the Mohammed cartoons in some western newspapers, a 60-year-old Roman priest was shot dead by two bullets to his back. He had been kneeling in prayer in the back benches of the church, after having celebrated Sunday mass in the afternoon, as usual.

The murderer was duly arrested, political and religious leaders condemned the act, and most public opinion declared itself appalled, while the haggard Christian community mourned its friend, witness and martyr.

Now, everything seems to have returned to a chilling normality. Even the bodyguards assigned to priests in Hatay and Smyrna have been recalled.

In those days, like everyone else, I flicked from channel to channel and turned the pages of the most diverse newspapers, trying spasmodically to understand, to find a reason, a motive, a meaning in this death so sudden and violent.

Many things were said� each expressed his view, his anger, his dismay, his disapproval and his amazement. Now silence has fallen, and mixed feelings reverberate in the hearts and minds of simple Christians trying to live in a Muslim-majority country.

I was a teenager when this man first came among us 13 years ago.

Already then he was silent and meditative, spending hours in our small church in prayer. We young people � and I was not even a Christian at the time � would ask our parish priest in amazement why he spent those long intervals before the tabernacle. He would reply that the priest was asking the Lord to show him the way. There was the possibility he may come to Turkey. We made a party for him on his feast day and before he left for Rome, he told us, moved: �Insallah (God willing), we will meet again�.

I never saw him again save for now, dead, in many photos printed in the mass media.

In the past, we would sometimes hear the distant echo of stories of murdered priests, but this was always something that happened in faraway countries, we never suspected that it would happen here, on Turkish ground. And yet Turkey has been the land of great martyrs. We are reminded continually of this by the many pilgrims who come all the way here from around the world, to recall the roots of their Christian faith.

This land is soaked with the blood of St Ignatius of Antioch, of St Chrysostom, St Babila and others. Those were times of persecution and hate, and their icons in church tell us about them.

It is on their blood, and the blood of St Paul, who worked so much for the Gospel, that our Church in Turkey was founded and flourished.

Then the Christian communities � as though they were no longer members of the same body of Christ � were forgotten by the West, busy on other fronts, and they fell into silence.

In 1846, the Catholic Church of Latin rite, that had never led Antioch out of its sight, returned to our city with the Capuchin Brothers. The first to arrive was the Italian, Fr Basilio Galli. Tireless, active, he won the sympathy of people; he opened a chapel and a small school. The plaque at the entrance of our church reminds us how he paid with his life for his zeal: he was martyred on 12 May 1851, stabbed in the back in church by two murderers, just after he celebrated morning Mass.

He was Turkey�s first modern-day martyr. After 155 years, the second, who showed the same zeal, the same energy.

The blood of the martyrs fecundates the earth.

They tell us that now the Christian community in Antioch is the most alive of all in Turkey, the most dynamic and open to dialogue and ecumenism.

What will become, then, of that of Trabzon, once flourishing and now reduced to the bare minimum?

Our parish priest explained to us that Fr Andrea is remembered as a person who committed himself to serving the poor, prostitutes and dispossessed people. In Italy, he was very involved in social work and had set up various structures to help needy people. We know well enough that one can do very little. You help someone when and how you can, but I don�t think it was this that gave meaning to Fr Andrea�s day.

Looking at our priests, our sisters, who left their entire world to come among us � but why do only so few decide and have the strength to stick it out here? � I ask myself how they manage to remain. Here there is dryness, inefficiency � by western standards � a poor life, without immediate successes: it is only faith that sustains and justifies such a presence.

The other night, at our weekly prayer meeting, part of the last letter Fr Andrea sent to his Italian friends was read out: �You and Turkey: who would have said years ago that I would have tied my heart to so far away? You and the Middle East: who would have said that I would have �carried in the womb� as it is said about Rebecca, two �sons� who �clash amongst themselves� (Gen 25:22), although they are brothers of Abraham himself? A mother knows her children will not be separated within her even if they are divided amongst themselves. This has happened to me too. I see in myself reasons to love one and the other, reasons to keep them together in the same �chalice� and gathered at the feet of the same cross. But I am aware also of the distance between them, even if it is corrected, but at times only disguised, by statements of friendship, respect and collaboration, sometimes truly soothed by the sincere efforts of more than one side to understand and accept the other, and to offer to each his heritage and to discover that of the other. At other times, I get the impression that these worlds are not talking deeply to each other, they are like those couples who only talk about shopping, bills, about furniture that must be shifted, or about their children�s health, and they delude themselves that they are communicating while in reality they are growing further apart.�

And he wanted to stay in the middle, to be an element of reconciliation with his life, and all this touched us deeply. Someone wanted to give his life for us, for us �nonexistent� Christians.

Further on, he wrote: �After a first phase of residency in Urfa-Harran, which ended some weeks ago with the closure of the �house of Abraham� and the definitive move to Trabzon, and after the second phase that ended with the completion of restoration works on the church of Trabzon, a third phase has started, as yet covered in shadows, in anticipation that God will show us his ways. This waiting unfolds in silence, prayer, hope and intimate availability to what God wants, in humbly accepting poverty of resources, people, instruments and personal capacities.�

�In this phase, I reread the history of our mission, I examine the present, I go back to the beginnings of the church in Jerusalem; let us listen to the scriptures, let us seek to understand better the world we come from and the world in which we have found ourselves, let us try to be as welcoming as possible.�

So what was he doing in Trabzon? He was waiting.

So why he was described as a �hero� on the front pages of newspapers in Italy? A hero fights, struggles violently, rebels using arms, wants justice at all costs, defends himself and wins by killing the enemy. It seems to me that, according to human logic, Dr Andrea was the figure of the �anti-hero�.

Nor, we are told, was he a saint. He was not a saint like those in the holy pictures: languid, sickly sweet, always compliant and smiling. He had an energetic character, he was decisive, even abrupt, at times resolute, and he did not allow for compromises� one can almost hear an echo of Luke�s description of Jesus, who �set his face resolutely towards Jerusalem�.

A friend of his, a sister, revealed that before returning to Turkey at the end of January, he had called her in Rome and confided: �You know, pray for me because I feel that I am annoying Satan��

A week later he was murdered in the name of God.

His death has reawakened us from the torpor of our consciences; it is reminding us what it means to die for love. It has reminded us that a Christian can make himself an uncomfortable presence that must be removed, eliminated. And if this is not the case, then one is not a true disciple of Christ.

But after death, comes Life.

The Church of Turkey perhaps needed more of this.

Perhaps we needed more of this.

His death caused us heartbreak, but it gives a new strength, a new hope. It teaches us love. That Love for which I asked for baptism, going against the advice of my family.

We have a new protector and intercessor up there. He chose to take our side. The side of the innocent and defenceless. Without rebelling. Right until the end. For love of God and brothers. This is a marytr. This is the death that brings Life.

Happy Easter in the Risen Lord and to one and all.

A Turkish Christian

**Gavur** · 06-24-2006, 12:02 PM

Alliance of Islams Eastern Raiders !

According to http://www.haberturk.com/newengine.p...31892&c_id=120 the 16 year old suspect O.A.while being transported from court made a certain handsign to reporters that indicates he belongs to the above named organization.
His trial lasted 13 minutes on the account of witness being absent and was postponed to july 13.I t was determined that the Glock brand gun used in this murder belonged to O.A.'s brother Alparslan Akdin.

**Gavur** · 07-02-2006, 01:20 PM

Priest Stabbed in Turkey - 3rd Such Attack

July 2, 2006, 1:46PM

By SUZAN FRASER Associated Press Writer
� 2006 The Associated Press

ANKARA, Turkey � A man stabbed a Roman Catholic priest Sunday in the Black Sea port of Samsun, a church official said, in the third attack against a Catholic cleric in Turkey in recent months.

The French priest, Pierre Brunissen, 74, was injured in the hip and leg and rushed to a hospital, Monsignor Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar for Anatolia, told The Associated Press by telephone from his church in Iskenderun, southern Turkey.

Brunissen, of Samsun's Mater Dolorosa church, lost a lot of blood but his condition was not life-threatening, Padovese said.

Police immediately detained his 47-year-old attacker, the Anatolia news agency said. The man, who was identified by the initials A.N., was described as being mentally ill and had made complaints against the priest for allegedly making Christian propaganda, the agency said.(Gavur-according to ntvmsnbc he was accused of killing his own mother, in October of '06 he was certified as a lunatic)

It was the third attack against a Catholic priest in predominantly Muslim Turkey since February, when a priest was killed while kneeling in prayer in his church in the nearby city of Trabzon.

Another priest, a Slovenian, was grabbed by the throat, thrown into a garden and threatened with death in the Aegean port city of Izmir.

Also, a man upset by the newspaper caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad admitted throwing a fire bomb that caused a small fire on the roof of another church in Izmir.

"I hope this has nothing to with Islamic fundamentalism," Padovese said of the latest attack. "The climate has changed. ... It is the Catholic priests that are being targeted."

A 16-year-old youth currently is being tried for the killing of the Rev. Andrea Santoro, 60, who was shot Feb. 5 while praying in his parish in Trabzon. Witnesses said the youth shouted "Allahu Akbar!" _ Arabic for "God is great!" _ before firing two bullets into Santoro's back.

**Gavur** · 07-02-2006, 01:27 PM

Trebizond was once a thriving Christian center.

Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium was once a thriving Christian center.

Turkey/Anatolia/Asia Minor was once a thriving Christian center.

The East was once a thriving Christian center.

Cyprus was once a thriving Christian center.

Alexandria was once a thriving Christian center.

Egypt was once a thriving Christian center.

Lebanon was once a thriving Christian center.

Syria was once a thriving Christian center.

Ethiopia was once a thriving Christian center.

Afghanistan was once a thriving Buddhist-Greco center.

Pakistan was once a thriving Hindu center.

Persia was once a thriving Zoroastrian center.

Bangladesh was once a thriving Hindu center.

...

Anyone see a pattern here?

**Gavur** · 07-02-2006, 01:30 PM

There is no "moderate Islamic country." Eventually, these modern Islamic nations revert to barbarism. Why? Check the Koran for the source of the problem.

**Gavur** · 07-03-2006, 03:42 PM

Dead Priests in Anatolia

Dead Priests in Anatolia | The Brussels Journal

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1146

From the desk of Joshua Trevino on Mon, 2006-07-03 22:07

Fr Pierre Brunissen has been savagely knifed in Turkey � the fourth attack on Catholic priests in that country this year. His attacker has apparently complained about Fr Brunissen�s missionary activities. It is unlikely that Fr Brunissen was, in fact, proselytizing � the Catholic Church is not especially active in missionary work in Muslim nations, for the simple reason that it�s generally a swift road to death for both converter and the converted. Muslim orthodoxy prescribes death for the apostate. (Indeed, one of the cardinal problems with modern Islamism is the breadth of acts which constitute �apostasy� in its eyes: in a Turkish context, we read in Orhan Pamuk�s Snow that Islamist youth confuse ordinary adolescent lovesickness with this act.)

The grim catalogue of assaults on clerics betrays a resurgent paranoia within Turkish society � a paranoia that does not sit well with that nation�s pretenses to membership in �Europe�:

* The first priest attacked this year � and the only one to die thus far � was Fr Andrea Santoro. He was shot in the heart this past February with a 9mm pistol by a Muslim youth angry over the infamous Danish cartoons in an act of �religious revenge.� Fr Santoro died while praying in his church in Trabzon (itself ancient Trebizond): the killer yelled �Allahu akbar,� before firing twice into the priest�s back.

* Mere days after Fr Santoro�s murder, Fr Martin Kmetec, a Slovene Franciscan, was beaten in the Aegean port city of Izmir � former Smyrna � by a gang of youths angry (again!) over the infamous Danish cartoons. According to press reports, they seized him by the throat and shouted, �We will make you all die!�

* The next month, Capuchin priest Fr Hanri Leylek was threatened by a knife-wielding youth in the same city of Mersin that Fr Santoro perished in. The assailant, one Erdal Gurel, forced his way into the parish convent, yelling insults against Christianity and telling the priest, �You are not a human being! I will violate your mother, your sisters, your children.�

The founding myth of the Turkish state is its secularism. Turks, through the iron fist of the army and the soft persuasion of politics, have supposedly moved past the more regrettable manifestations of their Muslim heritage: jihad, dhimmitude, the killing of apostates, etc. But Turkey remains Muslim, and in an echo of the Ottoman millet system and the fundamental national concept of Islamic nationhood, that religion remains key to national identity despite the decades of secularizers � even to this day, a Christian holding Turkish citizenship is not considered a �Turk� per se.

Two things result from this state of affairs: First, a tension is set up between the demands of Islamic orthodoxy and the demands of modernism; when this tension is resolved in favor of orthodoxy, it is resolved in a fashion as decisive and hence violent as possible. Second, the line between an assault to Islam and an assault to the (supposedly secular) Turkish state, when coming from a non-Muslim, is blurred to the point of meaninglessness. Note, for example, this story, in which Turkish Christians in Turkey are threatened, not by Islamists, but by Turkish nationalists. The continuing pattern of demonization in the media speaks for itself: �Missionaries who are taking over every part of Turkey have now taken up residence at book fairs,� read a subhead in the right-wing Yeni Cag. In the Turkish smash hit film Kurtlar Vadisi Irak, devout Christians are shown killing Muslim children to harvest their organs: a pop-media twist on a libel previously reserved for Jews. (Indeed, in the movie, it�s a Jewish American doctor who oversees the organ-harvesting.) And on the official level, the line between defense of nation and defense of Islam is nearly nonexistent. Indeed, Christians there must operate in a gray underground of caution:

...Turkish police charged 293 people with �missionary activity� from 1998 to 2001, a state minister told parliament recently. People who place calls to Christian groups operating inside Turkey are warned against uttering the word �missionary� on an open phone line.

�Lots of my friends say �the M word,� � one receptionist said.

The attacks on priests in Turkey take place against this background of nationalist resentment and Muslim paranoia. One can only wonder how these will be inflamed when Pope Benedict XVI visits Istanbul in November. The fear and the violence are a curious combination for a state and society proclaiming its ardent wish to enter �Europe� by means of the EU. Why join a club whose basic identity and history are inimical to one�s own? In this context, Europe�s mere consideration of the possibility betrays the fundamental self-negation at the core of the European project.

The wounded bodies of the priests are warning � and prelude.

As an addendum, one may well ask why Catholic priests are being assaulted in Turkey, when the country is bounded by the Orthodox world. The answer is simple enough: the native Orthodox communities of Anatolia and Thrace have long since been almost wholly wiped out. The Armenian genocide is well enough known (outside of Turkish officialdom, in any case); less well-known is the slow extermination of the Greek community of Constantinople. On the latter, one could do far worse than start with Speros Vryonis� The Mechanism of Catastrophe.

**elendil** · 07-04-2006, 05:08 AM

There is no "moderate Islamic country." Eventually, these modern Islamic nations revert to barbarism. Why? Check the Koran for the source of the problem.

What do you propose? Should all muslim people abandon their religion?. Besides christian nations caused 2 world wars and countless massacres only in this century, just in case you forgot.

There must be a way and we will find it, if there is now way we shall make one. (Hannibal)

**Joseph** · 07-06-2006, 05:23 AM

Originally posted by elendil

What do you propose? Should all muslim people abandon their religion?. Besides christian nations caused 2 world wars and countless massacres only in this century, just in case you forgot.

There must be a way and we will find it, if there is now way we shall make one. (Hannibal)

I don't think anyone should abandon their religion but this stuggle is Dar al Islam vs. Dar al Harb ( as conditioned by Mohammed himself), a seperate Muslim and non- Muslim world in which treaties and peace is only temporary and Mohammed calls for the forced conversion and/or destruction of the non-Muslim world. We seem to be headed in the direction of an all out war between civilizations.

by:Bat Ye'or

The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam, 1985, Fairleigh xxxxinson University Press,

**Gavur** · 07-06-2006, 11:31 PM

Attacks against priests cannot be brushed aside

Look whose talking mediaval!
senin o yamik satilmis gotunu sikeyim

Originally posted by elendil

What do you propose?

There must be a way and we will find it, if there is now way we shall make one. (Hannibal)

Attacks against priests cannot be brushed aside
Thursday, July 6, 2006

Semih İdiz
The knife attack on Father Brunissen in Samsun, following the brutal murder of Father Santoro in Trabzon in February, is being brushed aside in Turkey as �the act of a madman.� That you have to be mad to carry out such attacks goes without saying.

But whether you can attribute such attacks to �madmen� and leave it at that is questionable. One cannot but agree with western diplomats that there is a tangible hatred of Christianity in this country. More so than in many other predominantly Islamic countries.

Turkish sociologists explain this in terms of �bad historic memories� going all the way back to the Crusades and involving proselytizing missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries that destabilized the Ottoman Empire.

This is what lies at the bottom of the lore that has entrenched itself in this country over the past 80 years. The mere mention of �missionary� is enough to get blood boiling among Turks.

It is no wonder then that the recent �Pew Global Attitudes Project� indicated that only 16 percent of Turks surveyed had anything good to say about Christians. Put another way, the �Islamophobia� that has grabbed Europe has its counterpart in this country in the form of a deep rooted phobia against all things Christian.

This is also what lies at the bottom of the difficulties being experienced by the Greek and Armenian Churches in Turkey. In fact when it comes to these churches, Turkish blood does not only boil, but it boils over with hatred for historic reasons. Needless to say the feeling on the other side is not much different.

Given that there are similar attitudes in Europe about Muslims; one might say that there is nothing out of the ordinary in all this. But when it comes to Turkey there is because it highlights some serious contradictions.

To start off with the most apparent one, �secular Turkey� is currently engaged in an effort to bridge civilizational gaps between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It is engaged in this with Spain under the banner of �Alliance of Civilizations� being conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.

Looking at the hatred of all things Christian in this country, though, one would have thought that Turkey would first start by trying to bridge some of these gaps at home in order to be convincing. There does not appear, however, to be a tangible effort on the part of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government to do so.

The irony is that according to the Pew Global Attitudes project, Spain is the country in Europe where antipathy towards Muslims is growing fastest. One wonders in this case whether Turkey and Spain are the best qualified countries to try and bridge the deep civilizational divide between the Christian and Muslim worlds, given the situation both countries are faced with at home.

Returning to Turkey, though, the rise in anti-Christian feeling also has something to do with the continual watering down of secularism. Neither can one put the blame for this on the AKP only. Take Rahsan Ecevit, for example, the self professedly �staunchly secular� wife of the former �staunchly secular� Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

It was no other a person than the same Rahsan Ecevit who just a few months ago came out with the curious remark that Islam was being lost in Turkey because missionaries were running amok in Anatolia. How Ironic it is that she is now arguing that secularism is what is being lost because of the AKP.

There is also the phenomenon of the Sunni based religious classes in schools, which are compulsory according to the Constitution. It was, again ironically, today's �staunchly secular� military that was instrumental in the introduction of this after the 1980 coup, based on the argument that religion would be the antidote to Communism.

So the picture is not exactly a simple one where you can blame the rise of Islamists for the fact that secularism is being watered down in this country. It is curious that those who are raising the alarm bells on this score find no need to question the whole notion of �compulsory religious education,� involving the teaching of a specific religion to the exclusion of other faiths. And this in a country that prides itself in being �secular,� which, if really true, requires that the system remain �equidistant to all religions.�

As for the remark by Education Minister Huseyin Celik, published in yesterday's Hurriyet, to the effect that �those who do not consider themselves Muslim should not enter these classes,� not only is this remark a deep insult to the millions of Alevis in this country, who are Muslim, but is also belied by the fact that religious classes in schools are �compulsory� according to the Constitution.

The simple fact is that there is little tolerance among members of the predominant Islamic sect in Turkey, i.e., Sunnism, for other faiths and beliefs, whether this be Christianity, Alevism, Hinduism or Judaism or, for that matter, atheism.

Rather than focus on this fact, the AKP government talks continually about �Islamophobia in Europe,� which does, in fact, exist. But the same government has no answers when one points to a similar phenomenon in this country vis-�-vis other religions or beliefs.

It should be no surprise then that there is an attempt to down play the attack on Father Brunissen. It is clear that the AKP is not prepared to go into this topic because it might then have to face unsavory facts about itself, and its constituents, not to mention about Turkey itself.

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