The Pope has a case of the sads:
Pope Francis expressed his sadness Sunday after Turkey’s decision to convert the former Byzantine cathedral of Hagia Sophia back into a mosque.
In improvised remarks after reciting the Angelus, the pope recalled that July 12 is Sea Sunday, when the worldwide Church prays for seafarers.
“And the sea carries me a little farther away in my thoughts: to Istanbul. I think of Hagia Sophia, and I am very saddened,” he said, according to an unofficial translation provided by the Holy See Press Office.
The pope appeared to be referring to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to sign a decree July 10 turning the sixth-century edifice into an Islamic place of worship.
The presidential decree was signed within hours of a court ruling Friday, which declared unlawful an 80-year-old government decree which converted the building from a mosque into a museum.
Go here to read the rest. Hagia Sophia was the great church of Christendom prior to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Until recently the policy of the popes was to make certain that Islam would have no further opportunity to convert churches to mosques. Time for that to be the policy of the Church again.
Hard not to notice that those on the political left, who never fail to remind us that we are still evil because we “stole the land” from the “Indians” who were here first, never mentioning the many similar things like the Hagia Sophia was Catholic first and ought to be returned. Maybe we’ll see intifada and BLM street mobs in Istanbul demanding that…?
“…the sea carries me a little farther away in my thoughts…I am very saddened.” Well, that’s showing the evil, pagan death cult the what for. I’m pretty sure Barney the dinosaur or the Wiggles could have said something more stern. He would be hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that he actually has an immense responsibility he abdicates on a regular basis. Does he ever rise to the occasion?
Much of the time, the project of acquiring dependencies in the 3d world was a fool’s enterprise. However, there are slices of it we should have taken and didn’t, slices we should have held on to longer to allow the local populace time to acclimate itself to certain sorts of institutions, and certain slices we should have kept as self-governing dependencies. The Aegean coast, most of Thrace, and the old city of Constantinople should have been taken and held in 1918. (And the Kurdish areas in southeast Anatolia, while we’re at it). From Enver Pasha to the present, Turkey’s treatment of its minorities has ranged from discourteous to murderous.
The Greeks could have taken European Turkey and held it with ease. The foray into Anatolia was a fool’s errand.
The Greeks would still have been expelled from the Turkish mainland, but the same would have happened to the Turks in the former European Turkey. And Constantinople would be Greek right now.