Blogging takes time, which I didn’t have on Friday after finishing an analysis for the Reuters wire about religion in Turkey posted here. I went to Istanbul to research several religion stories. The main impression I left with was that the prospect for religious policy changes raised by the “post- Islamist” AK Party government in recent years has mostly evaporated. The current political crisis that could end up banning the party and barring Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan from belonging to a political party means the end of any liberalisation. In fact, the steam went out of the reform drive a few years ago after Ankara got the green light to negotiate Turkish membership in the European Union.

Turkey has been a test case for what Islam experts call “post-Islamism,” a trend among Muslim political groups that have given up dreams of some kind of Islamic state in favour of more democracy and human rights that include greater religious freedom (here’s a useful summary of the concept). The idea that Islamists could turn into “Muslim democrats” (or “latte Islamists“!) without a hidden agenda to introduce Sharia law once in power met with considerable scepticism. But the Erdogan government, which promoted greater freedoms in Turkey as a means to join the European Union rather than to break down secularist controls on religion in the public sphere, seemed to be prove this view. His cautious approach seemed to reflect a long-term policy to make changes gradually. It’s too much to say this could be a “model” for other Muslim countries because there are too many aspects specific to Turkey and the limits its powerful secularist elite places on religion in the public sphere. But it could be an important test case for reconciling democracy and religious rights.

The political analysts I spoke to were unanimous in rejecting the idea that Erdogan’s AK Party had a long-term “hidden agenda” to “islamise” Turkey. The real goal of Erdogan’s policy was to establish his bloc of business interests from the more religious countryside as partners in the national power structure dominated by the secularist urban elite. Part of this process was to appeal to the religious sentiments of the masses, but religion was never the core of its program. They dropped this caution after their election victory in 2007 by pressing for an end to the ban on headscarves at universities — and paid the price by provoking the legal challenge to their legitimacy.

“They are the victims of their own limitations,” Ankara University sociologist Dogu Ergil told me. “They wanted a place in the power system and once they go it, they stopped… They have depleted their reformist arsenal. This is as far as they can go. This was the end of their liberalism and understanding of freedoms.”

Cengiz Aktar, a professor of European studies at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, said the process of loosening restrictions on religion was not over, but it was now on hold for what he called a “period of restoration” that would reassert control by the secularist elite. “It’s put on ice. It’s not at its end. They will freeze it for some time. This ‘Turkish best practice’ needs to be rethought during this period of restoration. They will have to come back with a new idea.”

Rusen Cakir, a journalist who has written extensively on faith and politics in Turkey, agreed that efforts to reconcile democracy and Islam would continue but they were not the central issue for Turkish politics. The real issue was political power in Turkey, where the large state role in the economy means “if you control the government, you can control lots of money,” he said. Fears of a “hidden agenda” were unfounded, he said, but the secularist parties used them to mobilise their urban middle class base. “It’s kind of a class struggle. Each side has its own ideological tool — secularism or religion.” Or as Ergil put it, “religion here is a political instrument used by both sides.”

In a country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim, the remaining one percent is not politically significant. But the government’s attitude towards the religious minorities is a good barometer of how it feels about religious liberty. During my stay, I spoke with Catholic and Orthodox churchmen who reported little progress and some backsliding on the question of religious freedom. Their impression was also that Ankara had lost interest in any liberalisation after it got the green light for EU accession talks.

“The minorities were a hot issues for a while, but in the past two years, there has been no movement at all,” said an official at the Istanbul headquarters of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of all Orthodox Christians. A Catholic churchman said senior Church officials traveled under guard “and that tells you something.”

“We have to be very careful,” he said. “Some newspapers talk as if there were thousands of (Christian) missionaries in Turkey. We Catholics don’t evangelise. The Orthodox don’t either. Only some Protestant groups do, but they have also become very careful.” Turkish nationalists whippped up the spectre of Christian missionaries trying to “destroy Turkish identity,” he said. “The nationalists are in retreat, and this is a kind of parting shot from them.”

That said, the Roman Catholic Church in Turkey is quite hopeful that the commemorative year for Saint Paul, who was born 2,000 years ago in Tarsus in today’s southern Turkey, will bring some small gestures of flexibility. The Church wants officials to allow a former church in Tarsus, now used as a museum, to be returned to its original state as a house of worship. The “Pauline Year” starting on June 29 would be the occasion to hand over the building to the Church for the use of the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims expected there during the following 12 months. Local officials have been quite helpful with preparations for the visitors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar for Anatolia, told me. But it’s still a big leap from being cooperative to actually handing over the church. Padovese is waiting for a final decision from the government.

In Tarsus, local business people clearly see the interest in the Pauline Year. The Tarsus Chamber of Commerce and Industry has set up the most interesting website about the commemoration that I’ve found. Among the gems are 360° panoramic views of the Tarsus church, both its interior and its exterior, the story of St. Paul’s life and a detailed account of his missionary travels.

After my quick initial post on this story, an American reader asked what greater religious freedom meant for the average Turk — a very difficult question that I tried to answer in the comments section here. A Turkish reader sent me an email calling my analysis “a piece of scrap,” saying that “latest developments in Turkey” were not a reform and disputing “that people were under pressure on religious matters during the pre-AKP period.” But he declined to elaborate his criticisms when I asked for more detail, so I can’t say more than that this sounds like a critique from a very secularist Turkish point of view, one I do not agree with.

I notice from other blogs that the idea of “post-Islamism” is either new or dubious to many readers out there. What do you think about the idea that “Muslim democrats” are working to reconcile Islam and modern political systems?

I’m in Istanbul this week for a few stories. The first one, about how Turkey’s political crisis has put a trend towards a more liberal stand on religious freedom on hold, has just run on the Reuters wire (click here for full text).

I’ll get back to this issue in a later post.

In the meantime, feel free to post questions in the comments box and I’ll try to answer them.

The gloves are off in the election campaign for a new primate of the Greek Orthodox Church following the death of Archbishop Christodoulos last week. At least four metropolitan bishops are openly vying for the powerful Greek Church’s top post, some of them making their intentions known literally minutes after Christodoulos was buried last Thursday. The election is set for Feb. 7 and mud-slinging and accusations of blackmail are on the daily agenda.

A total of 78 members of the Holy Synod, the majority of whom were appointed by the late Archbishop Serafim (died 1998), are entitled to vote. Metropolitan Bishop Chrisostomos from the Peloponnese said in an open letter at the weekend he was a victim of “blackmail and mud-throwing” from supporters of Efstathios, Metropolitan Bishop of Sparta. Efstathios, one of two front-runners in the race, said: “I cannot believe any one of my supporters could be involved in something like that.”

What is at stake is the powerful influence of the Church over about 95 percent of Orthodox Greeks among the 10 million population, the Church’s extensive financial interests including major real estate developments and a mending of ties with the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. The Church of Greece’s relations with the spiritual head of the world’s Orthodox Christians were damaged to the brink of collapse during Christodoulos’s tenure. While Christodoulos deftly used the media to raise his own profile, this exposure turned some supporters away in the later years of his 10-year reign. Critics said he used the media to interfere in government policy-making, accuse homosexuals of having a “handicap,” call Turks “barbarians” and attack the patriarchate. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, an ethnic Greek from Turkey, runs a tiny Orthodox community in what was once the Byzantine capital of Constantinople and needs outside support for his delicate balancing act with the Turkish government.

Many Greek Orthodox say it is time for the Church to move away from such a public profile and revert to its strictly religious role, minimising the loss of supporters. Efstathios and Metropolitan Bishop of Thebes Hieronymos are the two front-runners. Hieronymos had repeatedly clashed with Christodoulos and refused to back the Church in crucial large rallies to oppose the then Socialist government’s plans to remove a reference to religion from EU-approved IDs. He is considered a more progressive choice than Efstathios, a strict follower of religious protocol and an aide to the late archbishop. Efstathios was also in charge of the Church’s finances for the past six years.

The two other candidates seem to have weaker support from members of the Holy Synod. One is Anthimos, the Metropolitan Bishop of Thessaloniki, who is known for his fiery comments regarding Greek ethnicity and the alleged threat to its national identity from Balkan neighbours. The other is Ignatios, Metropolitan Bishop of Dimitriada, who is seen as the candidate most like Christodoulos.

The Roman Catholic Church statement about evangelisation last Friday was one of those classic Vatican documents that are short on news but long on content. We covered it in a news story from Vatican City, but it was not top news that day (”Christians should spread the faith” is not exactly a new message). The document also avoided the blunt tone that sometimes comes out of the Vatican — an angle journalists were watching out for — and dealt with a sensitive issue “softly, softly,” as one theologian put it.

The impact of this document should unfold slowly in the context of the Vatican’s relations with Orthodox churches and with Muslims. It proclaims a duty to spread the Gospel without respect to geographical boundaries. That sounds like a rebuff to the Russian Orthodox argument that Rome should not seek or accept converts in traditionally Orthodox countries. It’s also a challenge to Muslim countries that forbid conversion, to the point of declaring apostasy — i.e. leaving Islam — a crime worthy of the death penalty. Since the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) says it issued the text because of “a certain confusion about whether Catholics should give testimony about their faith in Christ,” this document amounts to a practical guide for dealing with these situations. That’s not news now, but it can well become news at some point ahead if this leads to tensions.

Relations with the Russian Orthodox are sensitive and difficult to read. Metropolitan Kirill, the “foreign minister” of the Russian Church, met Pope Benedict on December 7 and said the session was proof of improving ties. A quick look at the Interfax Religion service seems to hint at a more critical view in Moscow. Kirill seems to take a tougher line back home. The Moscow Patriarchate is also concerned that Opus Dei, which just opened an office in the Russian capital, might proselytise in Russia.

Another question is whether this means the Catholic Church will become more active in its missionary work. The Church is already facing competition from evangelical and Pentecostal missionaries who are winning converts in developing countries, especially in traditionally Catholic countries in Latin America. In Muslim countries like Iraq , it says assertive evangelical missionaries arriving in recent years have upset a long-standing balance the Christian minority had found with the majority population.

Do you think the Catholic Church is right to claim a right and duty to convert people everywhere? Will it become more assertive about it now?

You’ve probably seen on TV how reporters swarm around leaders coming out of closed-door meetings and the politicians step up to deliver their soundbites for the cameras. The Vatican held a big closed-door meeting on Friday and a wave of cardinals — the “princes of the Church” who rank among the most prominent leaders of Roman Catholicism — emerged at their lunch break to find a pack of journalists eager to pounce on them with questions. I’m in Rome for a few days and was out there waiting for them in a parking lot between St. Peter’s Basilica and the Pope Paul VI Hall where they were meeting. The scene was quite different from those “normal” media scrums.

The session was a rare meeting of cardinals from around the world who are here at the Vatican for a ceremony on Saturday when 23 men “get their red hats,” i.e. join the College of Cardinals whose members under 80 years old elect the next pope. They were discussing the Catholic Church’s sensitive relations with other Christians — Orthodox they want to get closer to, Anglicans who are drifting further away, Protestants who are increasingly divided and Pentecostals who are encroaching on their flocks. These sessions presided over by Pope Benedict are supposed to remain confidential. So the men who emerged from the meeting looked and acted like anything but a bunch of politicians hoping to make it on to the evening news.

Some strode past the waiting journalists flashing half a smile and a quarter of a wave. Others found polite variations of the old “no comment”, like one who offered the (weak) joke: “If anything important had happened, you reporters would know it already.” Another walked straight up to a reporter from his home town, said he knew there was no way he could leave without talking to him, and then confessed with a smile: “But actually, I have nothing to say.”

Time passed and more silent cardinals glided by. There were dozens and dozens of them, all identically dressed in black robes with bright red buttons, sashes and skullcaps. One tall one sported a dashing cape. A shy one was nearly hidden under a kind of wide- brimmed hat that nobody outside Vatican City has worn in at least a century or three. We heard bits of talk in Polish and another language we couldn’t identify. When a gust of wind blew the skullcap off one cardinal, he cried “Halleluja!” and went scampering after it. I dutifully noted this down, not knowing if I’d get any other quotes for the day’s story.

Journalists scoured the crowd hoping to spot a familiar chatterbox. One slipped into a waiting car before any of us could reach him. The news spread quickly about the one who got away. Others just didn’t seem to be there. If the reporter was a devout Catholic, this was the time to start praying for news.

Finally, Cardinal Walter Kasper appeared and the pack converged around him. Kaspar is head of the Vatican department dealing with other Christians and had just delivered a speech on that issue, so he could speak with authority. As for confidentiality, well, we were only asking him to quote himself. Being the friendly, open man that he is, Kasper was sure to say something.

As the cardinal spoke, another ritual of Vatican reporting unfolded. The first journalist to buttonhole him started out in Kasper’s native German and he responded. But as soon as more journalists crowded around, Kasper switched to English, assuming that was the language all would understand. He outlined his speech in English, chuckling when he had to ask for a translation of an Italian term he had used in his speech. Once he got his message out in English, he fielded questions from radio and TV correspondents in French, Italian and then German again.

Speaking Italian is almost a prerequisite for the job as cardinal — this is, after all, the Roman Catholic Church. Most official documents and a lot of unofficial schmoozing among cardinals (such as before a papal election) goes on in the language of Dante. Many of them picked it up during graduate studies in Rome or an earlier stint working in the Vatican bureaucracy. Some of them, including Pope Benedict, can switch effortlessly among four or five tongues.

As for his comments, Kasper added one more piece to the puzzle about how Catholics and Orthodox Christians can work more closely in future. The Orthodox agreed in Ravenna last month — for the first time — to recognise that the Church was universal and the Bishop of Rome, i.e. the pope, is the highest-ranking figure in it. According to the hierarchy of the ancient Church, the patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul) is the second-highest. This is causing problems for the Russian Orthodox Church, which accounts for more than half the world’s 220 million Orthodox Christians and has become more active on the Christian world scene since communism collapsed in its homeland. The Patriarchate of Moscow and All Russia cannot see why it should be ranked behind the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which has only a few thousand members in its church in Turkey. The Moscow Patriarchate was centuries away from its founding when the ancient Church ranked the five top patriarchates. If the agreement about the pope being the highest-ranking figure means that the Ecumenical Patriarch is automatically the second-highest, Moscow is likely to say nyet.

This is where Kasper made an interesting comment. There wasn’t enough space in the news story for the whole comment, but here it is in full: “Of course we cannot restore the system of the five patriachates of the ancient Church. We have to take seriously the Russian Orthodox Church. But what Ravenna said was that there is a universal level of the Church. That’s the first time they’ve said this. There are not only regional churches and patriarchates, but the Church on the universal level. And if one church is not in full communion on the universal level, the Church is wounded … Then Ravenna says that also, on the universal level, there is need (for) a protos , a primate, and according to the old taxis of the ancient Church, this can only be the Bishop of Rome. There is no other candidate. They recognise this. We did not say what the perogatives are, what we can and can’t do. That will be the issue of the dialogue. This is a very important step we have reached, but the way is still long.”

Hmmm. No mention of any number two slot here. Are they hoping to solve the Moscow-Istanbul rivalry by declaring that the standard by which any “victory” would be measured no longer applies in the modern world? I hestitate to write “watch this space” because progress on this will probably take years — if it comes at all. However, something’s moving there and a deal, if ever reached, could make Church history. I’ll tell you all about it if I don’t retire in the meantime.

Kasper’s comments on the Anglicans, Pentecostals and Protestants in general are in the main story.

After all this, let me ask if reporting about the Vatican confuses you. An institution like the Roman Catholic Church has so many traditions and quirks that it can take ages to get a good grasp of its complex ways. The Vatican is not undeciferible. Send in your questions and our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella and I will do our best to answer.

We reported on Wednesday that Metropolitan Kirill, the external relations chief of the Moscow Patriarchate, has been making very positive comments about relations between the Russian Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. “We now have a positive tendency — we have moved on from a severe frost to a thaw,” he told journalists in Moscow on Tuesday.

Now he’s said it directly to the Vatican, in an interview with the pope’s own paper L’Osservatore Romano (at the upper right of the PDF, in Italian). The Vatican daily on Thursday has an unusual front-page interview with Kirill where he spoke again of a thaw. “The big chill is over and it’s thawing time,” he said. The rest of the short interview repeats earlier statements about how the two churches share the same spiritual and moral valules and should work together to tackle the many problems facing humanity today.

Recent high-level contacts between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches are starting to show some results. It’s still in the atmospheric stage, but the comments from Moscow are now much more positive than they used to be. The latest came on Tuesday from Metropolitan Kirill, the external relations chief of the Moscow Patriarchate, in a very Russian turn of phrase — “We now have a positive tendency — we have moved on from a severe frost to a thaw.”

Pope Benedict has been wooing the Orthodox churches from the start of his papacy and would like to become the first Roman pontiff ever to meet a Russian patriarch. The current patriarch, Alexiy II, tested the Catholic waters with a visit earlier this month to Paris, where he met Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard and other French prelates. He spoke about “emerging cooperation” between the two churches, without going into too many details. Speaking to journalists the next day, Kirill added a clearer assessment. “We have achieved some very positive results recently,” he said.

So does the frost-to-thaw image add anything? For journalists weighing every word these men say, it pushes the story just a little bit further. It was another departure from the wooden responses we used to hear in the past. That usually signals some real movement behind the scenes. When will we see the next step?

The Russian Orthodox Church has published an embargoed statement from a Catholic- Orthodox dialogue session that it walked out of in protest this month. The Web site of the Church’s representation to European institutions in Brussels posted the text along with a commentary saying it would give its opinion of the statement later. The statement was not due to be released until November 15. According to the French Catholic news service I.Media, its early publication evoked surprise and disappointment at the Vatican department for ecumenical relations, as well as concern this could compromise the continuing talks.

The statement is interesting because Orthodox churches supporting it recognised the primacy of the bishop of Rome, i.e. the Roman Catholic pope. We already mentioned this breakthrough in this delicate ecumenical dialogue in a post on October 17, quoting two participants. The text says the bishop of Rome is the protos, or first among the patriarchs of Christian churches. “They disagree, however, on the interpretation of the historical evidence from this era regarding the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome as protos, a matter that was already understood in different ways in the first millennium,” it said. “It remains for the question of the role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of all the Churches to be studied in greater depth.”

Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev of Vienna, the Russian Orthodox representative to the European Union, said in an interview on the website that the absence of his Church made the work of this International Mixed Commission problematic. “The Moscow Patriarchate represents more than a half of world Orthodox Christianity,” he said. “Without it, the Catholic-Orthodox dialogue will in fact be a dialogue of the Catholic Church with less than a half of the Orthodox Church.”

Hilarian said he hoped a solution could be found by the time the commission meets in about two years.

P.S. Here’s the Catholic News Service story on the statement.

One of the fascinating aspects about reporting on religion is that the timeframes are far longer than most topics news agencies cover. Experts debate the fine points of little-known issues and progress can be slower than a snail’s pace. But it’s sometimes interesting to take a look at where they’re going.

A recent meeting of the International Mixed Commission for theological dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in Ravenna, Italy ended with a short communique that said: “The theme of the next plenary session, the date and location of which are shortly to be decided, is: “The role of the bishop of Rome in the communion of the Church in the first millennium.” Pope Benedict also mentioned this last week in his audience but didn’t elaborate on it.

Two participants at the talks have now fleshed that out a bit. These talks between the Vatican and the Orthodox churches, which broke from Rome and rejected the primacy or authority of the pope in the Great Schism of 1054, are now slowly getting down to discussing the crux of the problem. If Catholics and Orthodox are to achieve some kind of unity, something Pope Benedict has put high on his agenda, they have to figure out the role the pope would play.

Bishop Gérard Daucourt, bishop of the diocese of Nanterre just outside Paris, told the French Catholic daily La Croix that “for the first time, the two churches agree on the primacy of the Bishop of Rome. We now agree to recognise that two elements — collegiality and primacy — should exist at three levels of the Church — local, regional and universal. This is very important because, for the first time, the representatives of the Orthodox churches accept this form of primacy on a universal level that the Bishop of Rome could have … Until now, the Orthodox agreed to consider the Bishop of Rome as the primus inter pares (literally: first among equals). This time, it goes further, because we’re talking about authority.”

He said that if the Orthodox recognised some sort of papal authority, even a very weak one, the Vatican would have to show greater respect for collegiality (giving bishops a greater say in governing the Church) and “local Churches” (i.e. the different Orthodox churches).

Monsignor Eleuterio Fortino, under-secretary at the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, told Vatican Radio (here in Italian) that the experts had started to discuss “an issue that is essential in the dialogue between Catholics and Orthodox, a difficult issue”. He explained: “We’re starting to study in detail the evolution of the role of the Bishop of Rome in the Church and how it was expressed in the first millennium.” Back then, all bishops recognised the pope but had considerable autonomy in their own regions.

In 1976, when he was still Father Joseph Ratzinger teaching theology in Regensburg, the present pope said in a speech about ecumenism that “what was possible during a whole millennium can not be impossible today … On the doctrine of the primacy, Rome must not require more from the East than what was formulated and lived out during the first millennium.”

As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict was deeply involved in the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran agreement that resolved doctrinal disputes that led to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. That didn’t bring the two churches back together again in any organisational sense, but it resolved a long-standing dispute and made for better relations. It looks like Benedict now wants to reach back even further into history to improve relations with the Orthodox.

But not too quickly… Fortino told Vatican Radio the next full meeting of the commission would be “in two years, in the autumn of 2009.” And then they’ll have to study the papacy in the second millennium, he said.