c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In early December, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presided over the opening of a new synagogue, mosque and church _ the last partitioned into Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox sections _ in the Mediterranean resort area of Belek.

It was a rather flamboyant gesture on Erdogan’s part, designed to convince skeptical Europeans that the secular but largely Muslim nation of nearly 70 million people practices a religious tolerance that makes it a worthy candidate for membership in the European Union.

“Beyond its symbolic importance, this project gives the message of peace and brotherhood to the whole world,” Erdogan said at the ceremony.

On Wednesday (Dec. 15) in Strasbourg, France, the European Parliament voted 407-262, with 29 abstentions, to urge EU leaders to begin membership talks with Turkey. Those 25 EU heads of government are expected to give Turkey the official green light for consideration in a two-day summit in Brussels beginning Thursday, but the membership process could take years to complete.

A key issue for the leaders, and many of their constituents, is the degree to which Turkey is ready to conform to religious freedom standards as they exist in Europe.

Erdogan, who is described as a devout Muslim, is anxious that Turkey cast its future with a secularized but historically Christian Europe. And Turkey has undertaken a host of human rights reforms, including abolishing the death penalty and acting to rein in torture, along with political and economic measures.

But both the long scars of history and the short fuses of contemporary events threaten the effort _ including the precarious and fragile situation of the Istanbul-based Orthodox Patriarchate, the headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I and the killing in November of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, allegedly by a Muslim militant.

On Monday (Dec. 13), for example, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches and the Conference of European Churches addressed what they called “new pressures and difficulties being brought upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate.”

“We are pained to read of the public criticisms and attacks being made upon yourself and upon the Christian community in Turkey. Such hostility must be very hard to bear, with the added sense of isolation that it brings,” said the letter, signed by the Rev. Samuel Kobia, WCC general secretary, and the Rev. Keith Clements, general secretary of the CEC.

The letter was apparently prompted by the furor caused in Turkey in early December when the U.S. embassy, in an invitation to a reception, used Bartholomew’s title of Ecumenical Patriarch.

The Turkish government does not recognize an international role for Bartholomew, arguing that the Orthodox leader is merely the spiritual head of Istanbul’s Orthodox community of 3,000.

An angry Erdogan ordered public officials not to attend the reception and later, in a television interview, said, “We find it wrong that although none of our citizens has such a title, that invitations are issued in this form.”

For his part, Bartholomew, knowing that Europe is closely watching events in Turkey, has been pressing the government for permission to reopen a theology school that was closed by the government in 1971, when the secular government ended all religiously based education.

Even as Erdogan was launching the new houses of worship complex in Belek, France’s Roman Catholic bishops were cautioning their government on the Turkish bid, urging President Jacques Chirac to make full respect for religious freedom a precondition for opening EU membership talks.

“Certain basic rights, especially religious freedom, are not fully respected in Turkey, despite the reforms undertaken,” said a statement issued by Bishop Jean-Pierre Ricard, head of the French bishops conference. The bishops urged judicial recognition of minority religions, including property ownership and the right to build new churches and make repairs on existing structures, often denied.

The slaying of Van Gogh in the Netherlands on Nov. 2 has inflamed anti-Muslim sentiment among Europeans.

Typical of such views was that of French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, who in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Europe in September wondered “to what extent can today’s and tomorrow’s governments make Turkish society embrace Europe’s human rights values.

“Do we want the river of Islam to enter the riverbed of (European) secularism?” he asked.

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Maverick right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has seen his popularity grow since the Van Gogh killing, argues Turkey “is not a European country.”

“I don’t want an Islamic country in the EU,” he told Reuters in an Oct. 21 interview. “Islam and democracy are two things that cannot go together.”

But Dutch church leaders have said Turkey’s Muslim majority population should not be a reason for denying the country membership in the EU.

In a Nov. 29 open letter to Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, the Council of Churches in the Netherlands said the EU should insist that Turkey recognize minority religions, including the Syrian Orthodox Church. There are an estimated 15,000 to 50,000 Syrian Orthodox in Turkey and some 12,000 in the Netherlands, reported Ecumenical News International, the Geneva-based religious news agency.

“The fact that Turkey is a secular state with a Muslim-majority population certainly poses no obstacle for possible admission of the country,” said the letter, signed by Ineke Bakker, the Dutch church council’s general secretary.

“It is important that all religious minorities gain the right to build and maintain buildings such as churches and monasteries, to set up theological training, to speak and teach in their own language, and to be free in carrying out diaconal and other church-related activities,” the letter said.

The Dec. 16-17 summit is not the final word but only the beginning of a process expected to be launched sometime next year and take as long as a decade. If approved, Turkey must align the estimated 80,000 pages of EU law _ from how to slaughter animals to how to treat sewage as well as human and religious rights _ into its national life.

But as Kobia and Clements told Bartholomew on Monday, the European churches “will follow the process with the greatest attention, and will seek to accompany the Ecumenical Patriarchate in reflection upon our common Christian responsibility for the future of Europe.”

MO/PH END RNS