Benedict's grand gesture
ON HIS VISIT to Turkey this week, Pope Benedict XVI made amends for earlier remarks that offended many Muslims. The pope's turnabout, and the positive reaction of Muslims in Turkey, offers hope that Christians and Muslims can find ways to overcome the inevitable frictions involved in a continuous process of engagement.
In September, the pope's citation of an anti-Muslim statement by a 14th-century Byzantine emperor caused a furor throughout the Muslim world. The controversy turned what was to have been a visit of reconciliation between Catholic and Orthodox Christians into a test of Christian-Muslim relations.
Given that the trip was already scheduled, the pope's choice of statements was particularly maladroit. It reminds his Turkish hosts that, a few decades after the emperor's harsh words, the Turks conquered Constantinople, destroyed the Byzantine empire, and brought Orthodox Christianity under Muslim overlordship.
When the pope arrived in Istanbul, as Constantinople was renamed in 1930, he was careful not to give offense. He reversed his position that Turkey should not become a full member of the European Union. And when he visited Hagia Sophia, once the preeminent Orthodox basilica, then a mosque, and now a museum, he walked about as a tourist rather than kneel in prayer as Pope Paul VI did in 1967. (Some Muslims thought Paul was trying to re-Christianize the place.)
Benedict's grand gesture came Thursday at the splendid Blue Mosque. He took off his shoes, as Muslims do before entering. And then, wrote the newspaper Hurriyet, "he turned toward Mecca and prayed [standing] like Muslims." The p ope knew just the right touches to show Muslims that he honored their faith.
The p ope also reminded Turks that he wanted them to treat the few Orthodox Christians remaining in their country with respect. The Orthodox patriarch, whose headquarters are in Istanbul, is circumscribed in ways that would be intolerable in any society that values religious freedom. The patriarchate, for instance, cannot own property, and the patriarch can only be chosen from Turkish citizens. Turkey will have difficulty entering the EU until it allows Orthodox Christians and members of other religious minorities the space to fully express their faiths.
The p ope's visit, with its push-and-pull between deference and polite criticism, offers a model for how Christians and Muslims should deal with one another. They cannot ignore their shared history -- conquest and persecution and profound disagreements over doctrine and day-to-day religious practices. But they can find commonality in their belief in the transcendent, and the singularity of the divine. Dialogue and respect will do much to soothe the tensions inherent in contact between two great religious traditions.
