ROME – Following Sunday’s shooting at a Catholic church in a neighborhood of Istanbul, which left one dead and for which ISIS claimed responsibility, fear is growing again among the minority besieged Christian woman from Turkey.
“We Christians, here as in many parts of the world, must be careful,” said Father Alessandro Amplino, an Italian priest who serves in Turkey in the archdiocese of Izmir.
Sunday’s violence took place at St. Mary’s Church in Istanbul’s Sariyer district, a traditional working-class area of the sprawling Turkish city. Two gunmen wearing black balaclavas entered the church during mass shortly before noon local time, killing a Turkish citizen named Tuncer Cihan.
According to a relative of the victim who spoke to Turkish media, Cihan was a mentally disabled person who had been invited to the mass by relatives and who, in all likelihood, was not specifically targeted by the attackers. Video footage filmed inside the church showed the gunmen shooting Cihan as he walked in front of them, then leaving the church almost immediately afterward.
Islamic State quickly claimed responsibility for the shooting, using a Telegram account to say it was in response to a call by the group’s leaders to target Jews and Christians.
After a brief manhunt, Turkish authorities arrested two suspects in the attack, saying one was from Tajikistan and the other from Russia, and both had ties to ISIS.
Pope Francis offered his condolences for the attack during his traditional Angelus address Sunday at noon.
“I express my closeness to the community of Saint Mary’s Church in Istanbul which suffered an armed attack during mass which left one person dead,” he said.
Although Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan telephoned the church’s pastor and promised that “all necessary measures” would be taken to bring the perpetrators to justice, for many Turkish Christians the episode nonetheless brings to mind other past atrocities.
In January 2006, a Protestant church leader named Kamil Kiroglu, a Muslim convert to Christianity, was beaten unconscious by a gang of young men who shouted “Deny Jesus or we will kill you now!” and “We don’t want Christians in this country!”
A month later, an Italian Catholic missionary priest named Father Andrea Santoro was shot dead by a 16-year-old Muslim boy in the small town of Trazbon while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” apparently in retaliation for Danish cartoons satirizing Muhammad. Three other Catholic priests in Turkey were attacked shortly after Santoro’s death, but none were killed.
Ironically, Santoro’s bishop at the time, a Capuchin missionary named Luigi Padovese, had warned that the priest’s murder was part of a growing wave of anti-Christian threats in Turkey. Four years later, Padovese himself was killed by his driver and longtime assistant, Murat Altun, who stabbed the cleric multiple times and then beheaded him.
Turkey is officially a secular state, but about 97 percent of the population is Muslim and the country’s small pockets of religious minorities regularly complain of harassment and marginalization, particularly from ultranationalists who see Christians above all else. as agents of the West, often accusing them of being in cahoots with Kurdish separatists.
Although Turkey’s Christian population had fallen to around 150,000 before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the recent arrival of tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian refugees has strengthened the country’s Orthodox community.
Sunday’s attack comes ahead of Turkey’s local elections scheduled for March 31, and politicians from Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party and various opposition factions have expressed condemnation of the violence. .
“Any attack on a single human being, let alone our Christian citizens, is a betrayal,” said Cemal Enginyurt, an Istanbul lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party.
