{"id":4598,"date":"2006-11-14T23:27:41","date_gmt":"2006-11-14T23:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/the-voyage-to-turkey.html"},"modified":"2006-11-14T23:27:41","modified_gmt":"2006-11-14T23:27:41","slug":"the-voyage-to-turkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/the-voyage-to-turkey.html","title":{"rendered":"The voyage to Turkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

An editorial from America:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Among Turkey\u2019s elites there is profound fear of political and cultural fragmentation, particularly of secession on the part of the sizable Kurdish population. Intellectual dissent from the standards of official Turkish identity\u2014by acknowledging, for example, the Armenian genocide\u2014remains a criminal offense. Though members of the Greek Orthodox Church make up only a minuscule group, Turkey, as heir to the Ottoman Empire, clings to a centuries-old enmity toward Greece and in particular the Greek Orthodox Church, as the custodian of the Hellenic soul. <\/p>\n

The pope deserves credit for supporting the Orthodox Church on such hostile terrain. In choosing to visit Turkey, he has taken on a Herculean challenge that combines Turkish-European, Muslim-Christian and Orthodox-Catholic relations. At the heart of each problematic relationship lie questions about the status of human rights and religious liberty. God willing, even if the trip provides no immediate breakthroughs, the pope\u2019s journey will prepare the way for peaceful progress on these issues in the future.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Papa Ratzinger Forum has its Apostolic Voyage to Turkey page up and running<\/a><\/p>\n

Nothing on the Vatican page yet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An editorial from America: Among Turkey\u2019s elites there is profound fear of political and cultural fragmentation, particularly of secession on the part of the sizable Kurdish population. Intellectual dissent from the standards of official Turkish identity\u2014by acknowledging, for example, the Armenian genocide\u2014remains a criminal offense. Though members of the Greek Orthodox Church make up only…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe voyage to Turkey - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/the-voyage-to-turkey.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The voyage to Turkey - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An editorial from America: Among Turkey\u2019s elites there is profound fear of political and cultural fragmentation, particularly of secession on the part of the sizable Kurdish population. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}