A French Roman Catholic priest has been stabbed by a knife-carrying attacker in the Turkish Black Sea port of Samsun. The attack on Father Pierre Brunissen, 74, is the third assault on a Catholic priest in Turkey in recent months. Fr Brunissen was stabbed in the hip and leg and rushed to hospital, but a church official said his condition was not life-threatening. Police detained an unnamed 47-year-old man who they described as suffering from mental illness.
Well, perhaps the attacker was indeed mentally ill, but, if not this seems to be yet more troubling evidence that Ataturk’s secularist legacy is under pressure. The Brussels Journal has more on this story here, and while I would not agree with all of what it has to say on this topic, it links to this story from the Washington Post earlier this year, a story which contains this detail:
With perhaps 100,000 Christians in a population of 70 million, Turkey officially tolerates and protects faiths other than Islam. Unlike Afghanistan, which last month threatened to execute a Christian convert, the country has no laws barring Muslims from leaving the faith or against attempts to lure them away. Yet Turkish police charged 293 people with “missionary activity” from 1998 to 2001, a state minister told parliament recently. People who place calls to Christian groups operating inside Turkey are warned against uttering the word “missionary” on an open phone line. “Lots of my friends say ‘the M word,’ ” one receptionist said.
Rather oddly, the WP goes on to claim that “the tension dates at least to the 13th century, when Christian Crusaders sacked what is today Istanbul” without pointing out that at the time Istanbul (Constantinople) was a Christian city, and had been for the best part of a thousand years.
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