The killing in Turkey of three staff members of a small Christian publishing house (including one German) has aroused horror and outrage in Germany. The FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG comments as follows (19/4): “At first sight it might be deduced that Islamic extremists are behind the assassination. But this is not at all certain. In the past, the small publishing house had already been threatened by Turkish nationalistic extremists on several occasions. These ever-stronger groups seriously believe that the marginal activity of Christians, drastically curtailed in any case by the authorities, may be dangerous for a country like Turkey that is 99% Islamic…They also cannot tolerate the fact that their own government intends increasingly to lead the country in the direction of Europe and that this would involve the introduction of real reforms in the field of religious freedom”. More dangerous than the Islamic extremist groups, according to the paper, “are now the nationalist fanatics who perceive any deviation as a plot against the Turkish nation”. Writing in the SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG , Christiane Schlötzer observes: “The brutal assassination does not only strike at the miniscule minority of Christians” but “also Turkish democracy itself”. “The situation is contradictory: the government is more stable than any previous one and Turkey is outstanding for its growth rates that are the envy of Europeans. But Erdogan has failed to overcome the mistrust of some sections of society, who consider him an Islamic wolf disguised in a European flag. If we look more closely, there do not exist any conclusive proofs to corroborate this suspicion. […] But the dazzling image of Turkey may rapidly fade. A murderous attack like that of Malatya shows that tolerance, religious freedom and democracy are at risk. If Erdogan wishes to maintain his country stable, he will have to rapidly decide what needs to be done to win back the government’s ability to act; otherwise the extremists will continue to exploit the political vacuum”. Fr. Artur Stopka on the Catholic portal WIARA expresses his appreciation of the resignation of the President of the Polish chamber Marek Jurek, who resigned after the failure of Parliament to approve the constitutional amendments he had promoted: namely, the introduction into the Constitution of the principle of the defence of life from conception to natural death. “Marek Jurek’s resignation from Parliament and his decision to quit the ruling Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwo – PiS) in which he had occupied a leading position forcibly re-pose the question of the role of moral principles in politics, and the limits of acceptable compromise”, says Father Stopka. In his view “there can be no politics without moral principles” since “anyone who thinks he can pursue a political career divorced from morality deceives himself and others”. “The politician who places the directives of the party about the dictates of his own conscience is dangerous. For that would mean that, in the name of obedience to the leader of the party, he would be ready to approve anything, even what is most reprehensible. In this way he deceives those who voted for him and chose him as their own representative, entrusting him with the decisions that affect their life”. To the Catholic intellectual, historian and political scientist René Rémond, who died in Paris on 14 April, the French Catholic daily LA CROIX (16/04) dedicates an editorial and several tributes. “A Christian intelligence in the midst of society. A wise man in times of unrest. A master of nuance”. That is how he is defined in the editorial of Bruno Frappat who asks himself: “How will he be missed in France?”. “He will be missed by the Christian intelligentsia in a country in which believers” don’t have “a spokesman in university and intellectual circles”, he replies. But “he will also be missed by the Church that sometimes entrusted to him research on slippery themes” and “he will be missed by all those who simply seek a point of reference”. According to Robert Migliorini, Rémond was the expression of “a Catholicism of openness, anxious for a presence in the public sphere”, while Antoine Ferraud describes him as “a man of patient syntheses” who “steered a middle way between tradition and modernity, between the history of events and that of the longue durée”. Jean Boissonnat speaks of Rémond as an “indefatigable militant”: “from him we learnt that the Christian must not let himself be absorbed only by prayer, nor must he await for the say-so of the Church before adopting a position in the intellectual, political and social battles of his own time”. “Rémond’s reflections widely illuminated the field of the religious and intellectual history of France and of Europe” observes Daniela Zappalà in the Italian Catholic daily AVVENIRE (15/04). “His extraordinary capacity to achieve a symbiosis between political history, religious history, wider reflection on the present time, and his own very strong convictions as a believer, helped turn his work into one of the mainstays of French intellectual reflection in recent decades”; for this reason he has “unanimously been hailed as one of the last great savants”.
