Turkey Pledges to Return Some Religious Properties

Fearing mounting losses at the European Court of Human Rights and recent adoption of Congressional legislation calling attention to its repression of Christian communities, the Turkish Government issued a decree this weekend which would return Christian and Jewish religious properties confiscated after 1936, reported the Armenian National Committee of America.

“Erdogan’s decree, clearly prompted by increased Congressional scrutiny of Turkey’s repression of its Christian minority and successive losses at the European Court of Human Rights, would return less than one percent of the churches and church properties confiscated during the Armenian Genocide and the decades that followed it,” said ANCA Chairman Ken Hachikian. “Ninety six years after the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians, Greeks, and Syriacs, this decree is a smokescreen to evade the much broader consequences of those brutal acts. The ANCA will expand its outreach to Congress and the Administration to ensure that the Turkish Government comes to terms with its brutal past, respects the religious freedom of surviving Christian communities and returns the fruits of its crime.”

House Panel Urges Turkey to Return Churches and Religious Sites to 'Rightful Owners'

From Agence France-Presse

Patriarch Bartholomew holds a wooden cross in Istanbul

A US congressional committee on Wednesday urged Turkey to ensure religious freedom and return church properties to their "rightful owners" in a vote opposed by the Ankara government.

After a spirited debate, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved a text that says Turkey should "end all forms of religious discrimination" and "return to their rightful owners" all churches and other Christian historic sites.

Another Gross Example of the Repression of Christianity in Turkey

Why are we still seriously considering Turkish membership of the EU?

From The Catholic Herald (UK)

By William Oddie

Pope Benedict XVI, accompanied by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan during his 2006 visit to Turkey (Picture: PA)

Yet more evidence has emerged that Turkey’s proposed membership of the EU should be definitively ruled out on the grounds of the incompatibility of the proposed partners. To put it simply, despite the increasingly secular nature of contemporary Europe and certainly of the EU itself, nothing will ever change the fact that the cultural roots of Europe are Christian: and however insistent the Turks are about the secularity of Turkey’s political institutions, even these are beginning to show the ineradicably Islamic and increasingly Islamist character of Turkey’s underlying culture. And as an unpleasant case now unfolding demonstrates, this is Islam of a clearly anti-Christian character.

Briefly, the Turkish Prime Minister, Recip Erdogan, has put his weight behind attempts to crush a small Christian community and to seize an important part of its assets. Though there are now only a few thousand Syro-Orthodox Christians left, they are still in occupation of one of the oldest monasteries anywhere in the world.