Saturday, January 24, 1874. The Pratulin Massacre.

On this day in 1874 the Pratulin Massacre occurred in which the Imperial Russian Army shot down thirteen Greek Catholic (Ruthenian) congregants who had gathered to protest the forced assignment of a Russian Orthodox Priest to their parish.

The city today is in Poland, on the border with Belarus.

Ruthenians are members of an Eastern Rite Church which was first separated from the West at the time of the Great Schism, but which came back into communion with Rome in 1646.  Contrary to what might be supposed, particularly today, after time and distance passed from the 1054 schism and its renewed 1492 schism various Eastern Rite bodies that were in the Orthodox communion did start to come back in, with it indeed being the case that several Russian Orthodox Bishops came back in.  In Imperial Russia, however, this was violently opposed, including in the case of at least one of the bishops.  In the instance of Pratulin, this was one of several such instances as Russian Orthodox clerics were assigned to Ruthenian parishes against their will.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver ...: 

Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver Colorado

This is Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church in Denver Colorado.

Many people, when they hear the word "Catholic", immediately have what, in the English speaking world, are frequently referred to as "Roman Catholics" in mind.  In fact, however, "Roman" Catholics are Latin Rite Catholics whose churches use the Roman Rite.  Roman Catholics make up the overwhelming majority of Catholics, and indeed the majority of Catholics, on earth.

They aren't the only Catholics however.   The Roman Rite itself is just one of several Latin, or Western, Rites.  There are also several Eastern Rites, of which the Byzantine Rite is one.

The Byzantine Catholic Church, which is also called the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, uses the same liturgical rite as the Greek Orthodox Church and shares the same calendar.  It dates back to the conversion of the Rusyn people in the Carpathians to Christianity in the 9th Century.  That work, done by St. Cyril and St. Methodius brought to the Rusyn people the form of worship in the Eastern Rite.  They Rusyn church initially followed the Orthodox Churches following  the schism of 1054, but in 1645 the Ruthenian Church started to return to communion with Rome, resulting in the Rutenian Byzantine Catholic Church, which is normally called the Byzantine Catholic Church in the United States.

Immigration from Eastern Europe brought the Church into the United States. Originally a strongly ethnic church, in recent decades it has become multi ethnic and its strongly traditional character has caused it to obtain new members from both very conservative Latin Rite Catholics as well as very conservative former Protestants.  Indeed, while this church is very small, it has been growing and now has a Byzantine Catholic outreach to Ft. Collins, Colorado, where it holds services in Roman Catholic Churches.

Turkey was once cited as an exception in the Islamic world in that. . .

it seemed to have a stable, and highly secular, government.

Mosaic in the Hagia Sophia of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

In spite of the way headlines might cause people to believe otherwise, there are other Islamic nations that can make that claim now. At the same time, however, Islam has posed a challenge to political liberalization in areas in which it is strong.  Not all Middle Eastern nations with a Muslim majority, which is most of them, have Islamic or Islamic influenced governments by any means, indeed, not even a majority of them do, but contending with a faith that has seen no distinction between its religious laws and secular laws is a challenge for all of them.  This has brought about revolution in some, such as Iran, and civil war in others, such as Syria and Iraq.  The problem is never far below the surface.

Turkey was an exception as Ataturk aggressively secularized the nation, which he ran as a dictator, with the support of the Turkish Army.  That army, in turn, served to guard the political culture he created for decades after his death, stepping in to run the government whenever it regarded things as getting too far away from that legacy.  But with the election of Turkish Islamist leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the country has been moving more and more in the other direction.

And now the Turkish supreme court, in this new era of Islamization, has ruled that Ataturk's 1935 conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum was illegal.

Codex depicting the Sophia Hagia under construction.

What was overarchingly illegal, of course, was the occupation of the Hagia Sophia by Islam.  It's a Christian church.

The Hagia Sophia was completed as a Catholic cathedral in 537, having first seen construction in 360.  That is what it was until the Great Schism left it in the Eastern part of Christendom and it served as an Orthodox cathedral from 1054 to 1204, when it reverted to being a Catholic cathedral.  It served as an Orthodox cathedral.  In 1439 a murky end to the Schism was negotiated but which failed to really solve it. That a story for elsewhere, but in its final years the cathedral was once again an Eastern Catholic cathedral but one which also saw Latin Rite masses said in it. The last mass at the Cathedral was in 1453 literally during the fall of Constantinople, when the Ottoman Turkish forces broke into the cathedral and killed the Priests celebrating Mass.

The Ottoman Turks admired much of Byzantium and pressed the cathedral into service as a mosque, but keeping its numerous Christian and Byzantine symbols.  It was used as a mosque from 1453 to 1935, which Ataturk converted its use, as noted, into a museum.

This would mean that the church served as a Christian church for 916 years.  It was used as an Islamic mosque for 482 years.  If we take into account its service as a focus of Christian efforts, it was a Christian site for 1093 years.

Ataturk and his wife in 1924.

Like a lot of the things we discuss here, this story is complicated by World War One.  Going into the Great War Turkey was the Ottoman Empire and claimed to be the caliphate.  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been an Ottoman officer who came to see the Ottoman government he served in as effete, ineffective and anti modern.  He became the leader in what amounted to a rebellion against the Ottoman government over the issue of peace as that peace proposed to carve away large sections of Anatolia in favor its its ethnic minorities. This soon lead to the Turkish War of Independence which pitted the Turkish forces first against the Allies but, as time went on, principally against the Greeks.

The overplaying of the Allied hand in Turkey caused one of the great tragedies of the immediate post World War One world.  The Allied powers were, by that time, too fatigued to bother with a long protracted war and occupation of Anatolia, which is what defeating the Turks would really have meant. Their presence as victors, however, gave real hope to ethnic minorities inside of Turkey, with those minorities uniformly being Christian.  Moreover, they gave hope to the Greek government of amazingly recovering a portion of Anatolia that Greeks had not governed since 1453.  Not only did the Greeks seek to do so, but they sought to expand their proposed territory in Anatolia far beyond those few areas that had sizable Greek populations and into areas where those populations were quite limited. Giving hope to those aspirations, moreover, caused the struggle for that goal to rapidly become genocidal on both sides.

The European Allies lost interest pretty quickly in shedding blood for Greek territorial aspirations and in October 1922 the war came to an end in a treaty which saw 1,000,000 ethnic Greeks depart Anatolia as refugees, bringing nearly to an end a presence there that stretched back into antiquity, and which at one time had defined Greek culture more than Greece itself.  Some Greeks remained, but it was a tiny minority.  It was a tiny minority, however that continued to be identified by its Christianity, with both Orthodox and Catholic Greeks remaining.

Ataturk and one of his twelve adopted children.

Ataturk's victory of the Allies did not prove to be a victory for Islam.  Taking an approach to governance that might be best compared to that of Napoleon Bonaparte, he was a modernizing and liberalizing force who sought to accomplish those goals effectively by force.  As part of that, he saw the influence of Islam as a retrograde force that needed to be dealt with.

Indeed, Ataturk's relationship with Islam has remained a source of debate and mystery, like much of his personal life in general.  He was born into an Islamic family and had received religious instruction, but its clear that he held a highly nuanced view of the faith.  He was not personally observant in at least some respects and was a life long heavy drinker, a fact which lead to his early death.  He spoke favorably of the role of religion in society but it was clear that role was not to extend to influencing government.  Comments he made about Islam suggest that he thought a reformed Islam needed to come about or even that he personally did not believe in its tenants.  He was quoted to a foreign correspondent to the effect that Turkish muslims didn't grasp what Islam really was because the Koran was in Arabic, and once they really were able to read it in Turkish, they'd reject it.

As part of all of this his approach to governance, therefore, was Napoleonic, being a liberalizer and modernizer by force.  Like Napoleon, his day ended short, although his rule was far more successful than Napoleon's and his Turkey became modern Turkey up until Turkey's current leadership, which seems intent to go backwards in time.

One of the things that Ataturk managed to do was to reach a treaty with Greece in 1930 in which Greece renounced its claims on  Turkish territory.  As Ataturk continued to advance modernization in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia's occupation as a mosque came to an end in 1935.  It became a museum dedicated to the history of Anatolia and a spectacular example of Anatolia's history and culture.

Now that's coming to an end, along with what seems to be Turkey's long period of regional exceptionalism.

Hagia Sophia translates as Holy Wisdom. This move by the Turkish government is neither holy, nor wise.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church, Cheyenne, Wyoming

There are definitely exceptions to the rule, but generally, I don't try to actually comment much on religion on this weekly post.  Having said that, I'm not finding myself doing that in two consecutive weeks with this post, as both this one, and last weeks, have to deal with trends.  This week actually deals with a trend that's the opposite of last weeks.

First, this week's post:

Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church, Cheyenne Wyoming. 

This is Holy Apostles Orthodox Christian Church in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  This church was built in 2012 and is located on the edge of Cheyenne. 

This church is interesting in several ways, one of which simply the way it is named.  The Church is what would normally be called a Greek Orthodox church but presents itself as an "Orthodox Christian" church.  This stands in contrast to what we typically find with the various Orthodox churches which usually identify an ethnic component to them, such as Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox.  Indeed, while the various Eastern Orthodox churches are in communion with each other, they are all autocephalous and there are real distinctions between them at least to the extent that each of them has their own hierarchy.

They are also very traditional in many ways and to find one that doesn't note the ethnic component is simply unusual for them.  Also unusual is the design of this church which is highly modern (unfortunately in my view, as I don't care for this external office building appearance). 

While not knowing for sure, I suspect that these departures from tradition here were intentional and reflect an effort to deal with a decreasing ethnic component in the Orthodox Churches which they are going to have to deal with in order to survive. At the same time, however, it also may reflect an increased interest in the Orthodox community among traditionalist Protestants of various kinds who have investigated their own churches origins in the wake of numerous doctrinal changes in recent years.  There's been a bit of a boom, more than a ripple but less than a tidal wave, of traditionalist protestants coming into the Orthodox Churches, typically the Greek Orthodox Church, as a result of that.  This church, in its name and design, seems to be designed with an eye towards accommodating that. 

As is obvious, even the original post deals a fair amount with trends, but this is a most interesting one.

To be Orthodox, nearly anywhere, has for much of history, indeed for all of history since the Great Schism, meant to identify strongly with an ethnicity in sort of a unique way.  Dated roughly to 1054, the Great Schism was the separation of the Eastern and Western branches of the Church.  Except to learned Catholics and Orthodox, the Schism is fairly difficult to understand and my guess is that most church going members of any religion, save for most of the Orthodox and a fair number of Catholics are fairly unaware of it.  Indeed, they have to be, as to be quite learned, as a Christian, of the Schism is virtually to require a person to a member of either the Orthodox or Catholic faiths, as a full understanding of it doesn't leave much room to go in any other direction, excepting the Oriental Orthodox (which is yet another topic).

I've dealt with the Schism here before, and I don't intend to do so again now, but I note it as one of the byproducts of it was to leave the Eastern Orthodox without the head of the Church that they recognized before the Schism, i.e., the Bishop of Rome, as the head of the Church and that has meant, over time, that a lot of national churches have developed. Indeed, while originally the head of the schismatic branch, from a Catholic prospective, was the Metropolitan of Constantinople, today the largest branch of the Eastern Orthodox is the Russian Orthodox Church, which itself has a couple of branches due to the Russian Civil War.  I'm not going to go into that, however, either.

What I am going to go into is this interesting trend.

The schism has been remarkably persistent even though the two branches of the Church did manage to reunite in the 1400s before pulling apart again in the late 1400s.  While some date the Great Schism to 1054, it can also be tracked, in a way, to 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks and the Schism seemingly took on its long character.  The last Mass celebrated at the Sophia Hagia, it's worth noting, was a Latin Rite Mass as the city fell.  Anyhow, since that time the Orthodox churches tended to be highly national in character, while the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church (the Roman Catholic Church) tended not to be, even though there were certainly countries that were, and are, "Catholic Countries". While the latter may be true, there are Roman Catholics in absolutely every country on earth. . . even, it is known, in Christian hostile Saudi Arabia.

So the trend we note above is really an interesting one.  

Some Orthodox Christians have noted that as the world globalizes it will not be possible for the Orthodox national churches to remain national churches, and they shouldn't even want to.  For the time being, the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest branch, is probably fine being that, but the others are much less so.  Interestingly, at the very point at which they really can't do that long term, they're attracting new members, as the post linked in above notes.

The reason has to do with, mostly, converts from Protestantism.  There are, to be fair, some converts from Catholicism also, but then there have always been converts from Orthodoxy to Catholicism as well.  Indeed, an often missed story is that entire branches of the Orthodox communion have reunited with Rome, which is why there are Ruthenian Catholics and Byzantine Catholics of the Eastern Rite, amongst others.  Indeed, at one time large sections of the Russian Orthodox were set to return before events conspired against that, and oddly enough some of the Old Believers have in fact reunited with the Catholic Church.

But Protestant conversions to Orthodoxy is really a new thing.

This has to do with big changes in the various Protestant faiths on doctrinal matters that conservative or simply observant members of those faiths have not been able to accommodate. That's lead to some of those churches to see real divisions among themselves, with the Anglicans in particular exhibiting that.  This has lead to those churches splitting into multiple branches.  But beyond that, it's also lead to a lot of soul searching in various conservative Protestant groups with the result being that some have determined to become Catholic or Orthodox.

Going from a Protestant denomination to the Orthodox may seem like a huge stretch.  The Orthodox are highly traditional, as are Eastern Rite Catholics, in terms of their religious observance.  But that trip isn't as odd as it might seem.  In this day and age when so much information is available, knowledge on the nature of the early church is readily available, and for students of that, ultimately the choice is left to try to maintain that a person's Protestant denomination maintains Apostolic succession and tradition, or to become Orthodox or Catholic.  Becoming Orthodox is a big departure for most from what they're used to, but because it is such a massive departure, to some that trip may be all the more easy to take.  As noted here before, even in Wyoming there was one entire Protestant congregation that made that determination.

The Orthodox seem to be aware of that, and the church depicted above exhibits that knowledge.  Orthodox Churches are often highly traditional in appearance, and in fact downright beautiful, and its often easy to identify the ethnicity of the congregation.  In this case, neither is true.  But the identification of the church as "Orthodox Christian" sends a clear message.

Interesting development.