On The Martyrdom Of A Priest

Cross-posted at Mystery Achievement.

The first three items in John L. Allen, Jr.'s latest Word From Rome deal with the murder of Fr. Andrea Santoro in the Turkish town of Trabzon this past week. The excerpts that follow both belie the notion peddled in many MSM outlets that the murder had anything to do with the Cartoon Intifada, and underline the reason why the Counter-Intifada must continue.

Among other things, what Santoro's death illustrates is just how thin the veneer of civility sometimes can be in the border zones of the world where Christians and Muslims rub shoulders. In that sense, the lessons of the killing may have little to do with the cartoon controversy, but a great deal to say about the future of Christianity in majority Muslim nations.

On the afternoon of Sunday, Feb. 5, a 16-year-old Turk entered St. Mary's Church in Trabzon and fired two bullets into Santoro's lungs and heart, shouting Allah akbar, meaning "Allah is great." He later said he had been agitated by the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons.
[...]
I had the chance on Wednesday to speak with Bishop Luigi Padovese, a 58-year-old Capuchin from Milan who serves as the apostolic vicar in Anatolia, and who was Santoro's superior. Padovese was in Rome accompanying Santoro's body, and was set to return to Turkey after the funeral Mass Friday morning.
[...]
I asked Padovese what he believes the real motive was for Santoro's murder. He said he doesn't know what demons drove this young man, but said dismissing it as an isolated act is a mistake. Rising Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Christian prejudice, Padovese said, shaped the context in which the teen acted.

"It's the anti-Christian climate that has been produced in Turkey," Padovese said. "There's a strong current of religious extremism, and that climate can fuel this sort of hatred. It's passed along in families, in schools, in the newspapers."

Padovese said that every week the Turkish bishops' conference prepares a bulletin citing "denigrating comments" or "banalities" about Christianity that have appeared in the Turkish press.

"There's a false image of our presence that usually goes unchallenged," he said.

As one example of what Padovese has in mind, the Catholic news agency "Asia News" recently carried an essay by a Western academic who had been doing research in a small Black Sea Coast town last summer, near Trabzon. During that time he saw a local newspaper article titled, "A priest sighted." It reported that local children had seen a priest in the vicinity of the town, but chased him off, to the great applause of the locals.

The article quoted a local politician: "The priests who arrive in our area want to re-establish the Christian Greek-Orthodox state that was here before. There are spies among these priests, working for the West. They are trying to destroy our peace."
[...]
Padovese linked Santoro's death to the broader struggles of the small Christian population in Turkey, a country often lauded as a model of moderate, Western-style Islam, and currently a candidate for membership in the European Union.

"There were several million Christians in Turkey at the fall of the Ottoman Empire," he said. "How is it possible that in the arc of just 70 or 80 years we've become merely 60,000 or 70,000? The truth is that hundreds of thousands of Christians converted to Islam, taking Islamic names and hiding their identity, out of fear of persecution," he said.

"The Christian presence is still there, I know it's there," Padovese said. "Many of these people know that they are Christians, or come from Christian families, but cannot say so."

The same pressures, in different forms, affect Christians across the Middle East, which has helped produce a steady exodus among the estimated 20 million Christians in the region. Today there are more Palestinian Christians in Australia, for example, than in Palestine. The rapid decline of the Christian population has long been a source of concern in the Vatican.

Faced with these realities, some observers believe the pope has to do more to challenge anti-Christian prejudice.

In an interview in the Rome daily La Repubblica, for example, Italian Reforms Minister Roberto Calderoli called on the Pope to defend Christian rights.

"He has to do it and he has to do it quickly," said Calderoli, a member of the populist Northern League. "He must dialogue with the Muslim world to guarantee the reciprocity of rights and duties."

Father Santoro wasn't killed because of the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper that have for mysterious reasons taken five months to "spark outrage" among Muslims. He was killed because he was a Christian. And while he is, as Allen notes, the first Roman priest to be martyred in the 21st century, he is but the latest victim of a campaign by a putatively secularist Turkey to cleanse itself of the Christians who were once in its midst in far greater numbers.