---
title: "Ban the Pope"
date: "2007-07-18T12:12:00+01:00"
modified: "2007-07-18T12:12:00+01:00"
url: "https://rationalists.org.uk/articles/ban-the-pope/"
post_id: 4810
---

# Ban the Pope

The four-day visit to Turkey of Pope Benedict XVI at the end of 2006 was redolent with dangerous (if unstated) meaning. Though it was widely covered in the media, on the whole newspapers fell for the Vatican PR and totally missed the larger significance of a visit which, though not unprecedented – it was the third visit by a pope to Turkey – was undoubtedly important.

![Martin Rowson's ](https://rationalists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/images/0701-rowson-pope.jpg "Martin Rowson's ")Despite the news management and the evident desire to appease Muslims after the Regensburg speech gaffe, the pope did not visit Turkey primarily to speak to Muslims or even Turks. He was there in his capacity as CEO of one of the world’s richest organisations to talk business with the head of the Greek Orthodox church, Bartholomew I, the leader of the 300-million-strong world Orthodox community, and the nearest person Orthodox Christians have to a supreme religious leader. The visit was precisely timed to coincide with the feast day of St Andrew, the patron saint of Orthodox Christians.

Both sides made much of the need to bridge the theological gap between western and eastern Christianity. Formalised in 1054, this dispute revolves around the rival claims of Peter and Andrew to be the “first apostle”, successor of Christ and hence pope. But the theological debate was merely cover for a more mundane, if more business-critical, issue: property. Both Bartholomew and Benedict feel constrained by restrictions placed by the Turkish government on buildings and land and would like to put pressure on the Turks to reverse this. In recent years the Vatican has used the European Union to put pressure on the Turks over this very issue.

This, at least, was the original motivation for the visit. But since the speech at Regensburg, and the prejudiced invocation of a mediaeval remark about Islam, the visit inevitably became a damage limitation exercise as well. Despite the Pope’s long-expressed views on Islam – there for anyone to read, for example, in his co-authored book, Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam which contains an elaborate critique of Islam and its intolerance – and his hostility to Turkey’s entry into the EU (voiced in the unmistakable tones of rightwing opinion in his native Germany), the visit afforded an opportunity for Vatican spin doctors to claim that the Pope had changed his mind.

Despite the fact that he himself said nothing on the matter, and there is no confirmation of a change of position from any independent source, the Turkish prime minister stated that the Pope now favoured closer ties between Turkey and Europe (not, it should be noted, the EU), and many well-disposed leaders and states in the Muslim world also claimed a conversion had taken place.

The fact is, despite the need to pour a little conciliatory balm, the pope’s real interest is not reconciliation with the Muslim world but the reinvigorated unity of Christians and the prosecution of his long-declared war against secularism and the legacy of the Enlightenment. Such tactical concerns underpin the choice of source in the notorious speech, which quoted the Byzantine ruler Manuel II Palaeologus (1350-1425) denouncing Mohammed as bringing to the world only “the evil and the inhuman”. A similar citation could easily have been drawn from a Christian writer of the period: Francis of Assisi, Nicolas de Cusa or the Catalan scholar of Islam, Raimon Llull. What is significant is the political nature of the choice: a crude appeal to the hurt memory of Orthodox Christians about the late days of their empire, before the Ottoman Turks overran Constantinople in 1453.

If he is courting Muslims it is to recruit official Islam, be it senior clerics or moderate Islamist leaderships like the current Turkish government, into this campaign against the evils of secularism and Enlightenment. It is not, in the end, the side issue of the Pope’s views on Islam that should concern us, so much as this wider political project.

Should we not be asking: on what democratically or legally constituted authority do such potentates traverse the world at great public expense and inconvenience, to hold forth on matters of contemporary international politics? After all, the many issues in play these days between the Muslim world and the west – from oil prices to migration, from Iraq to Palestine – are not matters of theology, of faith, of the divine, but of politics. Clerical figures have no more qualification to sermonise on these issues than politicians would to rule on the oneness of God, or where to hold hands in prayer.

The claim by clergy on politics, in short, is a fraud. What Joseph Ratzinger is engaged in, abetted by the complicity of those promoting a United Nations-sponsored “dialogue of civilisations”, is a form of ideological land-grab.

In the west, there are frequent invocations of the need for Europe and the Muslim world to learn from each other and engage in dialogue. What is routinely ignored here is precisely the dialogue between Islam and the west which has been happening for two centuries in the work of writers in the Turkish world, the Arab world, Iran and points further east. The influence of western ideas and political systems on Turkey can be traced from the French revolution, through the 19th-century liberalism that informed the Young Turk movement, to the forceful modernising programme that inspired Kemal Atatûrk in the 1920s and 1930s (the subject of Bernard Lewis’s great 1961 work The Emergence of Modern Turkey).

One of the founding principles of Atatûrk’s ideology, Kemalism (along with nationalism and populism), is laiklik (secularism) – from the French laic, precisely the enemy against which the Pope, Bartholomew and all the other robed patriarchs are fighting. These debates in the east were not controlled by the clergy, but conducted by secular writers. Hence the move by the pope and his Orthodox and Muslim equivalents to imply they have never taken place.

It is precisely because the current Turkish government of Erdogan, which came to power in 2002, rejects this laiklik that it is such a favoured partner of the Pope. Conveniently for Ratzinger, Erdogan has positioned himself to be one of the two main interlocutors – along with the well-meaning Spanish government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero – of the “dialogue of civilisations”. This idea, in principle not a bad one, has been hijacked by states as a weapon against secularism and universalism. Its main UN commission is presided over by the most unsuitable personage of Federico Mayor, a mediocre former Francoist minister who as head of Unesco blocked any attempts by that organisation to protest at the Iranian threat to kill the writer Salman Rushdie.

Underneath all of these debates and statements lies a extraordinary imposture: namely that a collection of buildings in the centre of Rome, ruled by a gaggle of archaic and secretive clergy, which in its daily workings corresponds in no way to any principles of democratic, gender-equal or transparent practice, which has no concept of accountability or freedom of speech, should be allowed to have the influence it has – should, indeed, be allowed to exist as a state at all.

In recent years, under Ratzinger, and for years under his predecessor Karol Wojtyla, this overrated medieval entity has been allowed to play a role in formulating UN policy on matters of major import, notably birth control and use of condoms; it has also, in league with a peculiar and sexually repressive coalition of states (including the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Qatar), promoted policies that, if carried through, will lead to the unnecessary deaths of millions of people. For those looking for such an entity, this is indeed an “axis of evil”.

The only solution to the pernicious and devious antics of Benedict XVI, his acolytes and allies, is to do even more than to challenge the claim of clergy and their leaders to take up political and social positions – it is to place in question the very legitimacy of the Vatican itself. The time has long past when this carbuncle had any right to be treated as a state and given the protection for its diplomatic, ideological and money-laundering activities that it still enjoys. It would indeed be an excellent goal for reformers of global governance, and for proponents of global civil society, to set the eradication of the Vatican as one of their goals for their years to come.

If this cannot be done by international agreement between states, then other means of attaining this most desirable goal may be considered. The time may come when a mass mobilisation of secular and anti-clerical forces, drawn from across the world, is brought to Rome and simply occupies this anachronistic and pernicious entity; and in doing so abolishes the political and diplomatic authority of popes and cardinals, and turns the Vatican, its wealth and buildings, over to an international, secular, distributive society. It might be a change from demonstrating against the WTO, and would target an organisation that has done far more harm on the global stage. ■

Fred Halliday is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and a columnist for [openDemocracy](http://www.opendemocracy.net/home/index.jsp), where this article first appeared