Spotlight falls on discrimination against Christians in Turkey as Pope visits.
(Photo: Getty/iStock)Pope Leo XIV arrived in Turkey on Thursday for a three-day apostolic visit, the first papal journey to the country since Pope Francis travelled there in 2014.
The visit coincides with the 1,700th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and comes days after the publication of a detailed report documenting the continuing difficulties faced by Turkey’s Christian minority.
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The Council of Nicaea, held in what is now the town of İznik, produced the original version of the Nicene Creed, a central statement of Christian belief still recited in churches worldwide.
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Official Turkish statistics do not record religious affiliation, but estimates place the current Christian population at around 257,000 people – fewer than 0.3% of the country’s 85 million inhabitants. In 1915, Christians made up approximately 20% of the population of the same territory.
A 50-page report published on 24 November by the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) states that Christians in Turkey continue to face legal, administrative and social obstacles.
It says that the decline in Turkey's Christian community over the last century "stems from genocides, pogroms, and systematic state policies aimed at creating an ethnically and religiously homogeneous Turkish Sunni Muslim nation".
Key points include at least 12 documented physical attacks on churches since 2020, some involving firearms or explosives, and the expulsion of dozens of foreign Protestant pastors and charity workers on supposed national-security grounds, amounting to the "systematic targeting" of foreign clergy.
The negative portrayal of Christianity and Christian converts is common in textbooks and media, it says. "Hate speech" against Christians is "widespread" in the media and public discourse.
The report also details the confiscation or transfer of ownership of more than 1,000 church properties since 2002, and the continued denial of legal personality to many Christian associations, preventing them from owning property in their own name or opening churches.
The Halki (Heybeliada) Theological Seminary has been closed since 1971, limiting the training of Orthodox clergy, the report notes.
It quotes President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2019 statement, made in the presence of then US President Donald Trump, that the seminary would be reopened. Despite this, no steps towards reopening it have been taken.
The report goes on to say that UNESCO should request an evaluation of the status of Christian heritage sites in Turkey, including Hagia Sophia, Chora, and Syriac monasteries. The Hagia Sophia was controversially made a mosque again in 2020.
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"The ECLJ calls on Turkey to respect and protect its Christian citizens and residents, to uphold its obligations under the Treaty of Lausanne, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and to guarantee genuine freedom of religion and belief for all," the report said.
During his weekly audience on 24 November, Pope Leo XIV asked Catholics to accompany his journey with prayer, describing Turkey and Lebanon as “lands rich in history and spirituality”. Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin noted that Turkey remains “the cradle of Christianity” and underlined the importance of the Nicene Creed in defining core Christian doctrine.
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However, there is one thing that rings even falser than Reeves and Keir Starmer insisting that they did no wrong. That is the ridiculous sight of the Conservatives now trying to claim the moral high ground and pose as the party of moral probity and political consistency.
The Tories might think they are on an easy winner by attacking Reeves and Starmer for breaking their election pledges. Do they seriously imagine that the British public has forgotten 14 years of Conservative governments trashing promises, raising taxes, piling up national debt and saying one thing and doing the opposite?
Listen to Kemi Badenoch slamming Labour’s plans to raise welfare spending by another £9bn as “a Budget for Benefits Street” based on “hiking taxes to pay for welfare”. Nice try, Kemi. But the fact is the welfare spending surged under the Conservatives, rising from £211bn in 2013/14 to £297bn in 2023/4, according to estimates.
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In refusing to tackle the unaffordable burden of Britain’s bloated welfare state – including handing billions in benefits to foreign nationals – Labour is only carrying on where the Conservatives left off. Little wonder that, by the time the Tories were kicked out last year, interest payments on the Britain’s huge national debt had already reached £100 billion a year – around twice what we spend on defence.
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Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, also hammered Reeves’s Budget as “a huge tax grab” and a “clear breach” of Labour’s manifesto pledge not to raise taxes on working people. Given Reeves stuck another £26bn on tax, he might have a fair point, were it not for the small matter of the previous Conservative governments loading the British people down with the highest tax burden since the 1940s.
As for Labour overtaxing businesses, Badenoch assured us only last month that “we want lower taxes on businesses. We want more businesses”. Then why, businesses might ask, did the last Tory government raise the main rate of corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent in April 2023? Higher taxation has inevitably meant less money for companies to invest in jobs and growth.
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The truth is that, under Conservative governments from 2010 to 2024, over a quarter of a million companies went into insolvency in England and Wales. So much for the “we want more businesses” Tory Party.
Then there is the big issue of energy prices, with Badenoch announcing a “Cheap Power Plan” to cut bills for British families. This, we should remember, is the same Conservative Party which, when in power, increased the energy price cap and presided over record household bills.
Most importantly, it was the Tories who introduced the crazy net zero targets which have left Britain with some of the highest energy prices in the world and driven small and family businesses and farms to the wall. Ed Miliband covering the British countryside with solar panels is only a continuation of the net zero zealotry of Boris “make Britain the Saudi Arabia of wind” Johnson
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When it comes to probity, Stride has said that Reeves’s “downbeat briefings were all a smokescreen” and has asked the Financial Conduct Authority to probe “possible market abuse” over the pre-Budget briefings and leaks.
This might be more convincing if the Conservatives hadn’t faced similar accusations over Liz Truss’s 2022 mini-budget, when Labour asked the FCA to investigate whether leaks had enabled the markets to short the pound.
And so it goes on. It is no exaggeration to say that we watched Conservative governments repeatedly saying one thing and then doing another for 14 years. Inconsistency and promise-breaking have been almost the only constants in Conservative policy.
The conclusion I draw from this today is clear: we should never trust the Tories. Do not allow the failed party of the past to reinvent themselves as the supposed solution to the problems that they created in the first place.
Only Reform UK, the party I lead, can be trusted to keep our promises to reduce the burden of the welfare state, slash red tape and stand up for alarm clock Britain: the hard-working, tax-paying people who are the backbone of the economy.
Kemi Badenoch has raised one important question. In September, when she told the oil and gas industry that the Tories would no longer support the Energy Profits Levy, she conceded that, “you may ask, ‘why should we believe you when Conservatives introduced this levy’?”
Indeed. Why should we believe a single word they say?