Unity between divided Christians is the theme of the pope's visit next week to Turkey. But the gulf between Christianity and Islam will be the focus, suggests Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
With less than a week to go before Pope Benedict XVI arrives for his three-day visit to Turkey, times are busy at the Orthodox Patriarchate in the central Istanbul district of Fener. Gardeners push down newly-planted shrubs in the flower beds. In the tiny cathedral where the pope will celebrate the feast of St Andrew with ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew on November 30th, workmen are busy polishing the heavy candelabras. Senior church officials rush from interview to interview, dealing small doses of wisdom to some of the 3,000 journalists accredited.
There's a police delegation, too: two dozen besuited men led by Istanbul police chief Celalettin Cerrah. He looks grim, grimmer still after his cassocked guide has explained just how exposed the two church leaders will be during the service.
Cerrah has good reasons for concern. Pope Benedict is not popular here. While still Cardinal Ratzinger, he described Turkey's application to join the European Union as a "grave error against the tide of history". This September, months after a young fanatic murdered a Catholic priest in the Black Sea city of Trabzon, he raised hackles yet further here by tactlessly quoting a Byzantine emperor who said that Islam had brought only evil and inhumanity.
Turkey's top religious cleric immediately accused him of "harbouring the Crusading spirit" and hinted he would do better not to come. He has since relented, and will be one of very few state officials to talk to Benedict next week.
Elsewhere, opposition continues, however. One small Islamist party has festooned Istanbul with posters lambasting the pope's "ignorance and deceit" in big red letters. It has plans to bus in 70,000 people tomorrow for a last-minute "the pope shouldn't come" protest meeting.
On Wednesday last, police arrested 40 men staging ostentatious protest prayers in the former Byzantine cathedral of Agia Sophia, now a museum. Attention-seeking ultra-nationalists are promising more of the same.
With the stage set for a potential public relations disaster, small wonder the press in Turkey and abroad is talking up clashes of civilisations. For once, the image isn't far off target. Except that it's not Islam that the pope is coming to Turkey to talk about, it's the Orthodox church. And he comes not to divide, but as part of a personal campaign to try to heal a schism dating back 1,000 years.
For simplicity's sake, history usually dates the separation of eastern and western churches back to the summer of 1054, when papal legates marched into Agia Sophia and deposited a bull of excommunication on the altar. "May God look and judge," one of them said, as local priests begged him to take it back to Rome with him.
In fact, the estrangement had begun much earlier, with the slow break-up of the Roman Empire. Barbarian invasions and linguistic differences magnified growing differences between Greek and Latin communities. While the popes gradually cemented their centralised authority, the eastern church stuck to a more collegiate system. Rather than being a vicar of Christ, the patriarch in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) remains merely the first among equals.
There were debates on dogma too. Since roughly the 6th century, Catholics believe the Holy Spirit proceeds "from the Father and the Son." The Orthodox, who were never consulted about the last three words, consider their addition a betrayal of the unity of the original church.
All hopes that these differences might one day be patched up disappeared in 1204. On their way to the Holy Land, Crusaders dropped in to Constantinople to help an ousted Byzantine emperor back on to his throne. They ended up sacking the city and murdering tens of thousands of people.
"Even the Saracens are merciful and kind compared with these men that wear the cross of Christ on their shoulders," lamented one local chronicler.
The two churches were not to speak constructively to each other again until the 1960s. And when they did, led by Pope Paul VI and the then Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, Joseph Ratzinger was present as an adviser.
Overnight, Rome stopped referring to its eastern cousin as a branch lopped off the trunk of the true church. Instead it began talking of its "sister church". It was the start of a new era.
A liberal back then, Ratzinger is known now as a conservative. But his youthful enthusiasm for ecumenical dialogue has never dimmed. He's widely seen as the intellectual motor behind John Paul II's globe-trotting efforts to break down the divisions between different churches. And on being elected pope last year, he made it immediately clear that the reunification of eastern and western Christians was to be an absolute priority of his papacy. For many Orthodox, he is quite simply the most pro-Orthodox pontiff in living memory.
Excitement is not limited to the Orthodox community, either. Earlier this week, Halil Inalcik, Turkey's most famous historian of the Ottoman empire, was quoted by Turkish newspapers as saying that church reunification was on the cards. "We are standing on the threshold of history," he said.
Church officials on both sides are much more cautious. You don't heal a thousand-year split in 40 years of talking, no matter how well-intentioned, they say. Yet the evidence suggests that East-West discussions are now advancing fast.
"The only major issue still dividing Catholics and Orthodox is the issue of primacy," says Metropolitan Gennadios of Sissima, secretary of a delegation of Orthodox theologians who met their Catholic counterparts in Serbia this September. The discussions were part of the ninth ecumenical commission since dialogue restarted.
The Greek church has no difficulty acknowledging Rome's primacy of place, Gennadios explains, but it refuses to accept the pope's claim to universal supremacy. Decisions on matters of the faith should depend not on one man but on the assent of all bishops.
It's an issue both sides will be tackling at another summit scheduled to take place next year in Italy. That may not sound soon. Judged by the tortoise-like standards of much theological debate, though, it's full speed ahead.
Both sides are aware of a certain urgency. Seventy-eight when he was elected last year, Benedict XVI is an old pope. On the Orthodox side, the situation is more difficult. Though he is the spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox believers, Patriarch Bartholomew continues to be seen by Ankara merely as the head of Istanbul's dwindling Greek community.
"Three thousand left, 60 per cent of them over 50," says his press secretary, Fr Dosithios. "In 20 years, this community will be dead." A chemist who spent his adult life in Germany, he entered the priesthood after retiring and came back to help the Patriarchate. Most of his colleagues are outsiders.
This short-handedness also has a knock-on effect on the delegations the Orthodox side sends for talks with the Catholics. "While we struggle to field three theologians, Rome clicks its fingers and finds 300," Fr Dosithios explains.
A staunch supporter of Turkey's EU accession bid, Patriarch Bartholomew has always publicly stated that all will end well. As he put it in a speech to the European Parliament in 1994, creating a European project in denial of the East is an impossibility.
Twelve years on, the words ring like a challenge for the pope. He may not have proved very successful so far at bridging the gap between Christianity and Islam. With his Orthodox counterpart weakened today, a great part of the responsibility for healing the other schism rests on his shoulders.