Ostensibly, Pope Benedict is in Turkey to try to heal the wounds of words he repeated a while ago agitating the Muslim world.  Although Turkey is sort of a secular nation, its Muslims were outraged by Benedict.  He is there to smooth things over repeating the formula “I misspoke” or “You misunderstood what I meant”. But we forget the Schism that broke Christendom apart over language, distance and doctrinal differences over a thousand years ago.  Then, too, the changes crumbled the Ottoman Empire and ended just as World War II began, Turkey became a separate and then a modern nation under a remarkable man, Kemal Ataturk.

The differences between Islamic entities that arose out of the Saharan desert from its parent theological ancestors, the Jews and Christians, are still there. The religion of Muhammad was formed by an illiterate, itinerant salesman who fought the Pagans in his homeland and listened to voices and personages of the Angel Gabriel. He became convinced that “Allah”, among the gods of his people, was the one true God.  He rounded out the monotheism introduced by the Jews so that there were three voices of one God.  One voice spoke in Hebrew and Aramaic, another in Latin and the last in Arabic.  This became the norm in the first thousand years after the arrival of Jesus in ancient Israel.

But, the Pope-Patriarch division within Christianity became known as the Great Schism.  This is confused by the Schism between Catholics rooted in Rome and a break-away Papacy in France that was healed after a fashion to be later broken apart. This was when Germans followed Luther in a Reformation that still goes on today throughout the word of Christendom. But, Benedict, heir to the Healer  Pope, John XX111, has seen fit to try to smooth waters and see if a common language can be adopted by Latin speaking Catholics and Greek Speaking Orthodox Christians and their scion, Russian speaking Orthodox Christians.  It was a terrible wrenching apart of what was called Catholic (meaning universal) Christianity and seems to be insoluble today as it ever was.

The political problem is having Asia Minor, defined now as Turkey, become part of NATO - which is nowhere near the Atlantic. It could be considered by a stretch of imagination as European (The Ottomans were described as the Sick Man of Europe).  That is one political reason for Benedict to be making an appearance in Turkey today.

Benedict is no John or John Paul.  Events have swept away times which might have been amenable to going back and undoing the knots in the socio-religious-political fabric of time.  Now we are facing a clash between Islam and “others”. The problem has legs.  It seems to have a will and destination of its own.