"Even in Turkey, a country often lauded as a model of moderate Islam – to the extent that it is currently seeking European Union membership – Christians endure the wrath of angry Islamists. Rev. Andrea Santoro, an Italian missionary, was shot dead as he prayed in his parish church in the Black Sea port city of Trabzon. A teenage gunman angered by the cartoons screamed “Allah-u-Akhbar” (“God is great”) as he fired two shots from close range at the 61-year-old priest.
The reaction of the pope’s representative in Anatolia to Father Santoro’s killing, however, suggests that the anti-Christian violence was about much more than the cartoons. Bishop Luigi Padovese argues that rising Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Christian prejudice in the Muslim world shaped the context for the teenager’s crime.
“There’s a strong current of religious extremism, and that climate can fuel this sort of hatred. It is passed along in families, in schools, in the newspapers.” He added that areas of Turkey are now “completely Islamified, where it is dangerous to be a Christian.” The result, he said, is that Turkey’s small Christian population has dwindled from several million to 70,000 since the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of world War I."
Christians in the Middle East face persecution, pushed to the periphery - Catholic Online
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