And remember – John Allen is posting every day now – today with an interesting story about a mosque in Genoa:
Genoa’s Muslims have been looking to build a mosque for at least six years, and in 2004 they secured initial approval from municipal authorities for the purchase of an old ironworks factory for 300 million Euro. The factory would be converted into a mosque and other facilities for the Islamic community.
The plan, however, aroused considerable opposition from locals, who argued that the Cornigliano neighborhood of Genoa is not a Muslim area, so that construction of the mosque would mean a heavy traffic of people from outside the neighborhood, thereby altering its historic character. If Genoa wants a mosque, the locals argued, it’s not fair to make a neighborhood which has no real Muslim population carry the weight for the entire city.
That position was echoed by four local Catholic pastors, who wrote in opposition to the mosque to civic authorities and also to the man who was their archbishop at the time, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone – who is today Pope Benedict XVI’s top lieutenant as the Vatican’s Secretary of State.
In 2004, Bertone largely backed the opposition. He said the Muslims have a “sacrosanct” right to a place of cult, but that it should be built in a more “neutral” location where a largely non-Muslim population would not have to bear the consequences.
Those arguments were picked up with vigor by center-right political forces in Genoa, who opposed the project on the basis of cultural arguments as well as security concerns.
In the end, approval to build the mosque at the Cornigliano location became bogged down in local politics, so it looked for a moment like the local Muslims would end up with a rusting 300 million Euro factory on their hands, but no possibility to turn it into a place of worship.
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