Humanity welcomed

The echo of the recent terrible armed attack on January 28 has not yet died down, which violated not only the sacredness of a space of prayer, but of the Eucharistic celebration itself, in the Catholic church of Saint Mary of Büyükdere suburb in Istanbul. It is not so much the jumble of political-religious claims, suppositions and exploitations that followed that interests us here, but an aspect of a contextualization of the facts, not only clearly erroneous but also deliberately misleading.

It is not clear how and why the news of the tragedy in question was reported by international press agencies as an attack perpetrated in "an Italian Catholic church"! It would be enough to know the semantics of the terms used to realize the funny oxymoron created by the association of "Catholic" and "Italian": what by definition is universal cannot be restricted to the limits of a nation. In this case, the data is clearly false because neither the community of the Conventual Franciscan friars, which has the responsibility of animating the community in question, nor the Sunday assembly of this community can be identified due to particular ties with the Bel Paese.

It is, moreover, totally anachronistic to assimilate the current Istanbul Latin Catholic world with the Levantines: the Europeans of Turkey more or less direct descendants of the mercantile communities that had settled in the capital of the Byzantine Empire since the 12th century and last representatives of the oldest historical Italian-speaking community existing abroad. Ultimately, this assimilation perpetuates the logic of the millet, a socio-political concept whose name derives from the Arabic milla, which originally means group or sect, and which was based on the Islamic ethnic-religious concept of the dhimma, a basic element also in the constitution Ottoman of the new Islamic political society. This system recognized the community identity of the various non-Muslim ethnic groups (Greek Orthodox, Armenians or Jews), even if not territorial, but with a limit: that of being second-class subjects, with inferior rights compared to the umma, or transnational community Muslim. Now, although this historical framework is totally outdated, for those who exploit religion by attributing it with secular and not just spiritual purposes, it is a legacy to be used for identity purposes, especially where a given group looks with hostility at what is different and which it believes threatens its existence.

The paradox is that those who believe they are on opposite sides are implicitly allies in this vision: on the one hand, believers from so-called minority groups, who see themselves in a position of weakness, transform the immutability and the sectarian closure of their church of belonging as a tool to affirm their identity. On the other hand, those in power, who use this withdrawal in their favor, to accentuate the control and limitation of the citizenship rights of fringes of the population that they consider, generally wrongly, not very loyal or not "soluble" in terms of social cohesion.

In fact, this climate limits, if not completely prevents, the public expression of beliefs, including ethical and spiritual ones, as a vital element of the democratic debate for an inclusive society in search of meaning. That sense and community solidarity that poor Tuncer Cihan, killed in the church of Santa Maria on the last Sunday of January, was also looking for. Tuncer was not Italian but a Turkish citizen, he was not Christian but Alevi. However, he was welcomed by the Christian community of Büyükdere as a creature who, as such, is sacred, welcome as in all the churches where work is done for the reconciliation of the heart and the Spirit, a gift from that God who in the Christian vision even became man to be in solidarity with the condition of his creatures!


Claudio Monge
NP February 2024