Pope Francis is to visit Turkey on 29-30 November with the aims of strengthening links with the Orthodox Church’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, and of supporting the cause of peace in the region. Turkey shares borders with Syria and Iraq, who have both lost territory to the terrorist Islamic State. The feast of St Andrew, who is particularly revered in the Orthodox Church, falls on 30 November.
Francis received a letter of invitation on behalf of the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Friday.
However, a senior Turkish religious official has attacked the plans, accusing Pope Francis of failing to defend Muslims from “violence and discrimination” in Western countries.
“The Pope must translate words into deeds regarding the misperception and misinterpretation of Islam,” said Mehmet Gormez, the head of Turkey’s Presidency for Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, which supervises religious practices, including the country’s 85,000 mosques. “All religious institutions must defend against this, including the Vatican. This won’t be done by such things as washing a young girl's feet or arranging inter-religious football games.”
Speaking at the Presidency’s Ankara headquarters, Professor Gormez said attacks on mosques had increased sharply in Germany, which is home to a large Turkish minority, from 36 in 2013 to 70 so far this year. He added that Islam was increasingly presented in Western Europe as a “security problem”, and said he believed the Pope had not done enough to protect its adherents.
Plans for the visit were also criticised by a former deputy premier from Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, Emrullah Isler, who said the Muslim world was currently facing “one of the most difficult times in its history”. “As Muslims, we are not doing and cannot do much to change this,” Mr Isler said at the same meeting. “All religious institutions, with the Vatican in first place, should be drawing attention to the problem.”
Turkey's 37,000-member Catholic Church, which is denied legal recognition in the predominantly Sunni Muslim country of 80 million, has suffered a wave of outrages, including the 2006 murder of an Italian-born Catholic priest, Fr Andrea Santoro, at Trabzon, and the 2010 fatal stabbing of Bishop Luigi Padovese, president of its Bishops’ Conference, at Iskenderun.
The papal visit would follow Turkish pilgrimages by John Paul II in 1979 and Benedict XVI in 2006, and come after the Government in August agreed to allow an Orthodox church to reopen at the Mediterranean port of Izmir, the former Biblical Smyrna, nine decades after Turkish militants torched all Christian buildings and killed the local metropolitan.
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