Rome / Istanbul (Catholic news / CBA). The Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew I is opposed to a conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. The late antique building was "built to bear witness to the Christian Faith," the honorary head of world Orthodoxy said, according to the Vatican Press Office Asianews (Thursday). "If it returns to serve a religion, it can be no other than the Christian one." Bartholomew commented on the opening of a summit meeting with other Orthodox church leaders at his official residence in Istanbul, the Phanar. Several politicians had brought it into the conversation with a view to the local elections in late March in Istanbul, among others by the ruling AKP of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to re-use of the Hagia Sophia as an Islamic place of worship. The Ecumenical Patriarch called the Hagia Sophia a testimony to the "historical and continuing presence of Christian thought in this country." To the claims for reopening the building as a mosque, he said: "We stand against this, however, and with us, all Christians, whether Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant." Hagia Sophia was built in the 6th Century on the site of an earlier building under Constantine by the Emperor Justinian I (527-565), and it later served as the coronation church of Byzantine rulers. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it was converted into a mosque. The founding president of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1934 ordered its conversion into a museum.Source: © CBA. All rights reserved
Photo: Bartholomew I - Image source: Wikipedia / Massimo Finizio
Link to Kathnews...
Trans: Tancred vekron99@hotmail.com
AMGD
4 comments:
Now he speaks about it?
He exudes the ¨False Prophet¨ syndrome.
He speaks about it now because pressure is currently afoot on the part of some Turkish Muslims to switch the building's status from museum back to that of mosque. Patriarch Bartholomew is a longsuffering bishop, and there is nothing at all sinister about him.
Jacqueline Y.
Go to confession, you risk committing the sin of detraction.
You are ignorant of how much mistreatment the Successor of St. Andrew endures from his own supposedly secular government. You don't know how the government that was supposedly guarding his freedom of religion is destroying the See of St. Andrew by closing the Halki Theological School in a blatant attempt to render his See extinct, the encouragement of the expulsions of the NATIVE, ORIGINAL, GREEK inhabitants of Asia Minor and Constantinople through pogroms and other despicable government programs that ought to be done to followers and sympathizers of Islam in the West.
You accuse of Bartholomew of being a "False Prophet"? Do talk after you start a crusade against Turkey, otherwise, you have hot air- you can't even overthrow your own corrupt secular government, wherever you're from.
Certainly, The Vatican will remain completely silent on any such issue. I can hear the knees trembling from moral cowardice as the hierarchs squirm with ecumenical and interconfessional angst.
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