Ah, here we go.
On Thursday, the Pope visited two structures associated with Islam: the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. What did he do in those places that is the question. Some are going berserk about what happened at the Blue Mosque already. Even before anything happened,Fox commentator Fr. Jonathon Morris was already getting email about the Pope visiting a mosque.
At Hagia Sophia:
Protected by an imposing security detail, Benedict XVI arrived at the mosque 5 pm. Accompanied by the museum’s director, he looked closely to the mosaic on top of the entrance; it depicts Constantine and Justinian giving the two churches (the old and the new) to Mary and Jesus. Inside the building the Pontiff also admired another mosaic, one that showed the face of Virgin Mary, an image that he eventually found again in the amphora that was given to him as a gift.
As he left Saint Sophia, the Pope stopped to meet a group of disabled Muslims.
Benedict XVI visited the Blue Mosque, the largest and most beautiful in Istanbul, as a public gesture of his esteem for Muslim faithful.
"We hope to find together paths of peace and fraternity to help humanity," the Pope said when thanking Mustafa Cagrici, the Grand Mufti of Istanbul, for allowing him to make the visit today.
The Grand Mufti was one of the signatories of a respectful but pointed open letter addressed to Benedict XVI in October, in the wake of the Pope’s Sept. 12 address in Regensburg, Germany.
The Holy Father removed his shoes before entering the mosque, accompanied by the Grand Mufti and by the landmark’s imam, Emanullah Hatiboglu.
After explaining how Muslims recollect themselves in prayer, the Grand Mufti began to pray. Next to the Muslim religious, and facing Mecca, the Pope recollected himself for a few minutes in silence.
The visit, which lasted some 30 minutes, ended with an exchange of gifts. The mufti gave the Pope the representation of a dove, symbol of peace, with the words from the Koran "in the name of God, clement and merciful."
The Bishop of Rome gave the Grand Mufti a mosaic in which doves were also depicted. On seeing the coincidence, the mufti commented: "A happy sign of fate."
Joan Lewis of EWTN describes the moment this way:
Then, in one of the most awaited moments of his trip, and in the holiest site for Turkish Muslims, the Pope visited the Blue Mosque for a half hour, a time he obviously enjoyed, asking questions and making comments as he did at Ayasofya.
He removed his shoes as is customary in a mosque and was guided throughout by the Grand Mufti and imam, who at one point asked Benedict to join in a moment of meditation. Both remained in solemn silence for a brief period, with the Pope meditating for a full two minutes. The Pope told the imam “this visit will help us together to find the ways, the paths to peace for the good of mankind.”
At one point the imam showed the Pope a Muslim prayer book and noted that all prayers begin with the word Allah, the name for God. The Pope then put his hand on the book and said “let us pray for brotherhood and all mankind.” There was an exchange of gifts at the end and when the imam handed the Pope a framed ceramic tile depicting a dove, the Pope said, “this picture is a message of fraternity as a remembrance of a visit I will surely never forget.”
Joan also has a very thorough, interesting narrative of the Mass in Ephesus, with much behind-the-scenes detail.
The essence of this argument would seem to be that the pope – or any Christian – may pray to God anywhere, not just in a Christian church, but even outdoors, even in a prison cell, even in a non- Christian place of worship, like a mosque.
Why would Benedict do this, and risk scandalizing some Christians, who may feel it was wrong of him to pray in a building specifically not dedicated to the triune God of Christian faith?
The answer seems to lie, in part, in Benedict’s somber, realistic evaluation of the present threat of war and socio-political conflict for the whole human family in this "globalized" world, and the consequent urgent need for human beings to find a way to live in peace together, so that our children and their children may not inherit a world of blood and iron ruined by war and its consequences.
Some analysts are beginning to argue that the threat Benedict opposes is more modern secularism than Islam. That is, Benedict opposes a society with no religious faith at all, no sense of the transcendent, the holy, more even than a society with a very different religious faith and law, if that society still has a profound sense of the holy and the transcendent. (Recall that much of Benedict’s September 12 Regensburg talk was a call to the secularized West to return to a religious faith and a conception of the transcendent that it has abandoned over the past two or three centuries.)
"Benedict opposes secularism because it is both absolute and arbitrary," Philip Blond of St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, England, wrote recently. "Thus does the pope attribute the failure of Europe’s common political project to the growing secularization of European culture… Thus Benedict’s true purpose in Turkey is that of uniting all the monotheistic faiths against a militant and self-consciously destructive secular culture… Far from being anti-Muslim, the pope views Islam as a key cultural ally against the enlightenment liberalism that for him corrodes the moral core of Western society."
If this is so, it would explain a great deal.
It would explain why Benedict is reaching out to the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, but also to all the other Orthodox Churches (and, in a very special way, to the Russian Orthodox, the most numerous of all the Orthodox Churches, even though there are rivalries between Constantinople and Moscow, the "second Rome" and the "third Rome").
And it would explain why he prayed in the mosque, after asking the Islamic world in September to reject violence.
At the end of the visit, the pope presented the mufti with a framed mosaic of doves.
"This picture is a message of brotherhood in the memory of a visit that I will surely never forget," Pope Benedict said.
And so it was that November 30, 2006, the very day Pope Benedict prayed in the morning with Patriarch Bartholomew for Christian unity after one thousand years of division, also was the day when Pope Benedict moved his lips in a private prayer, for an intention known only to himself — and in so doing overturned the image created of him in the Muslim world during the past few weeks.
From the pope of the "Regensburg insult" (though certainly Benedict intended no insult), Benedict had become the pope of the "Istanbul prayer."
Of such significance may be a few words, even when not spoken aloud. Of such significance may be a prayer, even when it is only for a few seconds
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