The secular establishment in Turkey has deceived everyone by playing on well-known fears. When non-Muslims demand their rights, the establishment says that if they give some rights to them, these rights might be used and abused by “fundamentalist Islamists.” When Sunni Muslims demanded some rights, they were denied with similar arguments — that the rights they demanded might be used by Alevis and non-Muslims.

Even if we overcome these very deep-rooted fear-mongering policies by the state’s secular establishment, it is quite difficult to solve religious congregations’ problems with the existing legal tools.

New legal instruments and structures should be created. A new religious institution should be introduced by law to regulate the relations of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and this institution’s framework should be compatible with its ecumenical nature. New legal regulations should be introduced for the upper-level religious institutions of religious minorities. New legal regulations are needed for the recognition of religious congregations and their institutions. Churches, synagogues and mosques should be given separate and distinctive legal capacities. It is obvious that the Turkish legal system, which only stipulates foundations, associations and corporations as legal persons or structures, is not suitable for the recognition of churches, mosques and synagogues.

Some nationalist circles have been unnerved by the patriarch and also CBS’ presentation of the news piece. And there are certainly discomfiting segments in the program such as those suggesting that Anatolia actually belongs to the Christians. But isn’t it true that Christian property has been confiscated in this country? Isn’t it a reality that we have to face up to the fact that churches, monasteries and schools have been shut down here? Aren’t the monasteries and clerical schools that were shut down in the 1970s still closed? How possible is it, really, to say that in a nation where the skewed understanding of secularism reigns, that the Christian minority has no problems when it even creates difficulties for quite a few religious Muslims, forcing some to go to European nations for their education?

The news piece in question says: “Fast forward a few centuries, and it’s hard to find Christians in İstanbul. One local church ‘60 Minutes’ visited holds 500 people, but during its Sunday service, its pews were practically empty. It was the same everywhere we went. At the turn of the last century there were nearly 2 million Orthodox Christians in Turkey; 1.5 million were expelled in 1923 and another 150,000 left after violent anti-Christian riots in İstanbul in 1955. Today, in all of Turkey, there are only 4,000 Orthodox Christians left.” What part of this is a lie? What part of this is wrong?

… I was amused to read the columns of most Islamic “free thinkers” in reaction to the Swiss ban. Words like Nazism, Swiss racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia were in boring abundance.

Racist Swiss? A country where “foreign” immigrants constitute a quarter of the population? Could the Turks really cohabit peacefully with 18 million foreigners in their country? Could they really cohabit peacefully with 4 million non-Muslims? How many Swiss journalists have been murdered by “pure-blood” Swiss because they have non-Swiss DNA?

Fine. Let’s forget the too-visible and disturbing asymmetry and, for a moment, subscribe to Schroeder’s wisdom and admit that failings in Muslim lands cannot be an excuse for failings in Christian lands. But does that mean we should not criticize failings?

Yes, we wholeheartedly praise the government in Ankara for eventually – albeit slowly – paving the way for the opening of Akdamar, an Armenian church in Van, for services next fall. But where in Schroeder’s epic optimism could we locate the almost nationally uniform uproar over the words of the leader of the world’s 300 million Orthodox Christians?

It is totally futile to put Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew’s “we-are-being-crucified-daily” plea under the magnifying glass. Focusing on the wording and its various connotations in different languages will only cause distraction from the big issue.

The heart of the matter should not be which words the patriarch chose to express himself; it should be why he, a Turkish citizen, feels the need to complain that “we are treated as second-class citizens,” and why he feels “crucified under a government that would like to see [his] nearly 2,000-year-old Patriarchate die out.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu responded immediately. He said, “I hope this is just a slip of the tongue. It is a very unfortunate statement. We do not deserve it. Crucifixion has never been a part of our history. I cannot see such a comparison coming from such a levelheaded person. I hope they were said by mistake.”

In reality, history shows that 19 Orthodox patriarchs were hanged, imprisoned or sent into exile by Turkish authorities. Yet, for Davutoglu, the Turkish nation was built on religious intolerance, and the Turkish Republic is a secular state; a democracy based on the rule of law that does not judge its citizens based on their religious affiliation, a place where every citizen is equal.

[ … ]

Even in Istanbul’s diplomatic circles, such remarks have raised eyebrows because several times in the past Bartholomew said that he believed in Erdogan’s goodwill. Still diplomatic sources acknowldge that Turkey’s situation is very complex and it is hard to understand whether what officials say expresses a desire for real change or not.

For his part, Istanbul-born historian E. Milas notes that whilst the authorities do not recognise the Ecumenical Patriarchate, they do recognise the so-called Turkish Orthodox Church, which was set up by the Turkish state, whose membership is so small it could not fill up a minibus even if it tried, but whose offices (confiscated from the Greek Orthodox Church) served as the headquarters for the ultra-nationalist Kemalist group Ergenekon.

Even well-known writer A. Aslan said that Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, or the priest Bartholomew as Turkish authorities continue to call him, is greeted by everyone with his historical title of patriarch, “whilst we continue to stick our heads in the sand, thinking that we can solve our problems with the Kurds and the Alevi and forget everything about we have done to the Armenians.”

As an apostolic nuncio with a long experience in the Middle East said, things in Turkey hardly change. Even when there is some movement, change is too often nipped in the bud.

I get really confused when I hear about a Christian leader going before the European Court of Human Rights.

BTW, I don’t fault this journalist. I think he’s a good man who is ashamed at the way that his government is behaving and for that I applaud him. But whether he realizes it or not, he is not doing us any favors.