Zenit News, a Rome-based international Catholic news agency, reports on the latest example of Turkey sliding away from its secular constitution, back toward the intolerance that characterized the Ottoman Empire. No, the Turks aren’t kidnapping first-born boys to serve as janissaries… yet. Here’s what is happening:
Not even the Mongols of the 14th century, when they killed 40 monks and some 400 faithful, succeeded in making one of the most ancient Christian convents in the world disappear, but perhaps Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, can.The convent in question belongs to a church that suffered Islamic conquest in the 8th century, the Syrian Orthodox, and the story of that church and this convent is a microcosm of Islamic intolerance in action. The convent of Mor Gabriel in the region of Turabdin, in southeastern Anatolia, was founded in 397. Zenit notes that Mor Gabriel isn’t just an ancient church; known to Syrian Christians as the "‘second Jerusalem,’ Mor Gabriel is in fact the See of the Metropolitan Mor Timotheus Samuel Aktas and the cultural and spiritual center of the dwindling Syro-Orthodox community of Turkey and of numerous Syriacs who've emigrated to the West. Just 50 years ago, some 130,000 Syriacs lived in the region of Turabdin… but today their number has decreased to just a few thousand.” Indeed, the once thriving monastic complex “today houses a small community of three monks and 14 sisters.”
Read the whole story on: Jihad Watch
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