Pope Leo XIV makes a recent visit to Turkey to protest inequality and a sense of exclusion, despite some progress being made in restoring their rights.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan frequently speaks of Turkey’s 86 million-strong, officially secular nation as saying, “99 percent of the population is Muslim.”
Yuhanna Aktas, president of the Assyrian Union, a group that represents Assyrian Christians in southeast Turkey, said, “Every time he says that, I feel excluded.
“We are not viewed as citizens of the highest order.”
According to historians, there are currently about 100,000 Christians in Turkey, up from nearly four million at the start of the 20th century, largely as a result of forced exile or massacres as modern Turkey emerges.
Pope Leo will visit Istanbul’s Assyrian Orthodox Mor Ephrem church, which was officially opened two years ago, where he will meet with local Christian leaders.
Turkey’s first new church constructed since 1923, the state granted the land, despite the country becoming a republic.
Despite a legal ban on non-Muslims from holding office, Christian minorities have also had trouble gaining representation. Many civil service positions have been closed to them.
According to Yetvart Danzikyan, editor-in-chief of the Armenian weekly Agos, “the only non-Muslim senior official in Turkey today is a local administrator from the Armenian community.”
The civil rights situation is adequately illustrated by this lone instance.
Aside from the lake, the Turkey Basilica illuminates early church life.
The Insiders of the Enemies
Christians and Jews were frequently referred to as “the enemies inside” by some government officials and media outlets for decades after Turkey’s independence, and they were also the target of discrimination and violence until the early 2000s.
And even today, the term “Armenian” is still occasionally used as an insult.
The London-based Minority Rights Group (MRG) stated in its 2024 report on Turkey that “non-Muslims were consistently discriminated against because the proponents of Turkish nationalism deemed them incapable of becoming Turks because of their , religious identity.
The government has been making an effort to address that, according to Laki Vingas, the founder of Rumvader, a Greek community support group.
“The state and we have worked together for 20 years to correct the injustices of the past. He told AFP, “We have no trouble meeting with the authorities because this process is not yet complete,” despite the fact that he had previously told them.
Despite the community’s unsettling circumstances, Danzikyan noted, such as the growing trend toward conservatism under Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted government,
Violence has occurred: Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist, was shot dead in Istanbul in 2007 and a young Armenian was killed while serving in the military four years later.
Armenians were threatened during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, and two gunmen shot dead and injured two people inside an Istanbul Catholic church in 2024.
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Violence
The controversial decision to convert Istanbul’s famous 4th-century Hagia Sophia from a museum to a mosque in 2020, according to Danzikyan, was another unsettling development.
He cited the closure of an Istanbul theological college in 1971, which had given the church its sole facility for training clergy in Turkey, as well as the possibility of reopening the Greek Orthodox seminary.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the subject of years-long blockade, brought it up in September at the White House, with US President Donald Trump promising to assist in reopening the case.
Despite a ban on such gatherings in public spaces, Turkish civil society is more willing to commemorate the Armenian genocide, a term that Turkey has vehemently rejected.
Vingas praised the emergence of “a much more open society, primarily in Istanbul,” where the majority of Turkey’s Christians reside, saying, “More and more people are asking questions than they are holding onto their prejudices.”
Source: Channels TV
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