Turkish spokesman rejects title of Ecumenical Patriarch

SEE THE ARTICLE: Turkish spokesman rejects title of "Ecumenical" Patriarch

Ankara, Dec. 1, 2006 (CWNews.com) - As a November 30 press conference in Ankara, the spokesman for Turkey's foreign-affairs ministry asked Pope Benedict XVI to refrain from using the title "Ecumenical Patriarch" in reference to the Orthodox prelate Bartholomew I of Constantinople.

The ministry spokesman, Namik Tan, explained to reporters that the term "ecumenical," implying a universal role in Church leadership. That implication would violate the principles of secularism that inform the Turkish republic, he argued.

Turkey does not have the legal concept of "separation of church (or mosque) and state", but rather, has a policy of complete political domination of religion by the government. The Turkish government is modeled after the revolutionary French Republic, and does not recognize the international canonical status of the Ecumenical Patriarch.

Classical Architecture Web Site Gets Revamp

The Grand Tradition website — "Classical Arts and Architecture on the Web" — has gotten a revamp; if you were a member before, you need to re-register. The new site software has extensive content editing.

http://grandtradition.net

Photos after the Ice Storm

We had a massive ice storm the other day. Tree limbs, breaking under the weight of the ice, has caused massive power outages in the Saint Louis area, and temperatures will remain below freezing for a number of days.

Click on any photo for a larger version.

Fortified Churches

WE MAY HAVE TO REVIVE the trend of fortified churches.

See this article Fortified churches in England, over at in illo tempore.
Click for photos of fortified churches.

Because of modern weaponry, contemporary fortified churches probably would have to be built underground, with sufficiently thick reinforced walls to deter bunker-buster bombs.

Pope Prays in Mosque

SEE THIS ARTICLE: His Lips Moved

Some analysts are beginning to argue that the threat Benedict opposes is more modern secularism than Islam. That is, Benedict opposes a society with no religious faith at all, no sense of the transcendent, the holy, more even than a society with a very different religious faith and law, if that society still has a profound sense of the holy and the transcendent. (Recall that much of Benedict’s September 12 Regensburg talk was a call to the secularized West to return to a religious faith and a conception of the transcendent that it has abandoned over the past two or three centuries.)

"Benedict opposes secularism because it is both absolute and arbitrary," Philip Blond of St. Martin’s College, Lancaster, England, wrote recently. "Thus does the pope attribute the failure of Europe's common political project to the growing secularization of European culture... Thus Benedict's true purpose in Turkey is that of uniting all the monotheistic faiths against a militant and self-consciously destructive secular culture... Far from being anti-Muslim, the pope views Islam as a key cultural ally against the enlightenment liberalism that for him corrodes the moral core of Western society."

This shouldn't be too surprising: Catholicism and Islam (as well as most big traditional religions out there) have a natural law morality that is fairly uniform, and sharply contrasts with the present Western culture and legal systems.

Liberal secularism became popular in Europe after the wars of the Reformation. But the bloodshed perpetrated by secularists in the past two centuries has far exceeded the carnage of even the worst religious wars.