Thankfully, we have Taner Akcam’s magnificently researched study, “A Shameful Act,” as rebuke and counterlesson. It may also be that the murder of more than 1 million non-Catholic Christians in the Armenian genocide is a non-homefield matter in the Vatican’s current damage-control foreign policy toward Turkey and Islam.īut the upshot - a spectacle of supposed reconciliation between the papacy and Islam last week that operated without moral memory or judgment - proved embarrassing to anyone who thinks there is no God but truth. Of course, it may be that the always-diplomatic Vatican Curia took possession of Benedict’s mind and body, having exorcised the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s well-known views about Turkey and Islam. The pope didn’t utter a peep about arriving in a country whose predecessor state, the Ottoman Empire, committed the largest genocide in history against Christians. Pope Benedict XVI’s just-ended magical military tour of Turkey - with helicopters overhead and riot police bristling on every flank lest he be plugged on his first visit to a Muslim land - revealed a profound truth: Those who forget the past sometimes simply want to forget it.
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