In search of Padre Giovanni, I went into the rectory, along a corridor hung with old French morality prints. One contrasted the death of the sinner, being subsumed into hell, with that of a faithful man ascending to heaven, all in faded pastel shades. Another showed Adam and Eve in the garden, accepting the apple from the serpent. These were the visions of my own pre-Vatican II childhood, the simple messages of an older church. I heard voices coming from a room which turned out to be a large kitchen. Padre Giovanni was sitting with several other people at a long table eating lunch, but got up and walked with me to the courtyard in front of the church. The church was entirely surrounded by a high wall, leaving large gardens front and back. Both were overgrown and the façades of the church and rectory needed paint, at least, and probably repair. With only about 350 Catholics in all of Alexandretta, the cost of repairs would have been difficult to bear.
We sat on a bench, which the young priest wiped clean with his handkerchief, in the shade of a small pine tree. He stretched out his long legs, and his beard with its few flecks of grey lay over his chest down to his stomach. The beard made him look more Greek Orthodox than Catholic. He was tall and thin, with an austere face. He wore the traditional Franciscan footwear, sandals, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes – a plaid shirt without Roman collar, a cardigan and a beige jacket. The hair on his head was the same colour as his beard, brown with a little grey, cut short.
I asked Father Giovanni why I had met Franciscans in every Muslim country, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, I had visited. For years in west Beirut, the Muslim half of Lebanon’s divided capital, Franciscans said mass in their chapel whatever the battlefield conditions outside. They turned up in such unlikely places as Libya, serving Polish, Filipino and other Gastarbeiter. They offered the sacraments to visitors like myself in the wilds of Somalia and on the banks of the Nile in Cairo.
“In St Francis’s time,” he said, in English with a strong Italian accent, “he thought there should be cooperation between Christians and Muslims. For all Muslim people, he became the possibility of living in peace between these two peoples.”
“It’s too bad he’s dead,” I said, thinking of Christian – Muslim bloodshed in Lebanon and Egypt.
He told me that there were 4,000 Christians in Alexandretta, the largest community being the Greek Orthodox with 3,000. As well as the 350 Roman Catholics, there were a few Armenians, Assyrians and Protestants.
“In the Orthodox Church,” he said, “according to tradition, they say the Mass in Arabic. The Orthodox youth who want to pray in Turkish, they come to our church.” Other communicants from outside his congregation were the many foreign seamen, mainly Filipino and Italian, whose ships berthed at Alexandretta harbour.
How were relations between the Christians and the overwhelming Muslim majority?
“Relations are normal,” he said. “Unfortunately, I see that between Christian and Muslim people there is no theological understanding. Generally, there is indifference. I heard it said, they are Muslims, we are Christians. Unfortunately, I say, because I am interested in how Muslims live their own faith. I was lucky myself to become friends, because God gave me the occasion, with an Imam. He is young. He came to our church, so we started to become friends. I pay a visit to him. He pays visits to me, and so on. I’m proud of this friendship, because I take it as a gift from God.”
“What kind of Muslim is he?”
“I know he is a special confession of Muslim, but I don’t know which. Not an Alawi.”
“Is there any intermarriage between Christians and Muslims?”
“There are ten or fifteen couples I am aware of, but I know they have some difficulties. Generally, Christians and Muslims don’t marry each other. That is a problem, of course. The Orthodox Church believes differently from the Catholic on marriage between faiths.”
“How?”
“The Orthodox requires that the partner who is not a Christian must be baptised. As Catholics, we do not ask this. The Catholic Church blesses the marriage, even when the other person is not baptised. If someone, man or woman, accepts to be baptised in order to be with his beloved, what kind of conscience has he about the sacrament of baptism? It is a problem I face with my Orthodox colleagues.”
The Orthodox may have been closer to the Muslim outlook. An old friend, who had converted to Islam for what he felt might have been base motives at the time, later became devout. “We believe,” my friend explained, “that motive in accepting God as God and Mohammed as his Prophet does not matter. It is important to become a Muslim, to submit to God, whether to get married or to avoid tax on non-believers or whatever. In time, God will act on you, and you become a true Muslim.”
I asked Padre Giovanni whether the Christians tended to be richer, as in Lebanon, or poorer than the Muslims.
“The Catholics,” he said, “generally come from families who were originally European. They are mostly Latin Catholic. They work in trade and are rich. If we speak of Christians here though, we have to discuss the Orthodox Church, which is much larger. As a minority, Christians face difficulties. For instance, it is not easy to find important jobs in this society. The better jobs go to Muslims. Here in this country, the Christians are second-class people.”
“Do the younger Christians want to leave the country?”
“It’s not a problem of young people, but of families. That is, there are a lot of families who leave to go to Germany, France, Italy, New York. Of course, it’s a problem especially for young people who don’t easily find work. This is worse in eastern Turkey, where the Christians are much poorer ...”
“Do the Muslims you know face the same problems?”
“Among the Muslims, there is the problem of secularisation. Many people do not go to the mosque, don’t have a religious feeling. Materialism and secularism are problems for both Islam and Christianity.”
The garden was quiet, but for the chirping of small birds, and cool despite the sunshine. Padre Giovanni stood to lead me on a tour of his church, where he said I could come to Mass the next day. We were on the steps of his church when an old woman walked up to him and told him in Italian with a strong southern accent to come inside and finish his lunch.
“This is my mother,” he said. “She and my father are visiting from Italy.” He promised to return to lunch in a few minutes. She walked back to the rectory, clearly disappointed.
“They built this church in 1888,” he said as we walked in, “when Alexandretta had large Italian, French, English and local Catholic communities.”
I imagined what it must have been like on a bright Sunday in those last years before nationalism and modernisation crept into the Ottoman Empire. The priest would have said Mass in Latin at the high altar, while several hundred Catholics who spoke different languages in their daily lives worshipped together. Despite changes in the world outside, the interior of the Church of the Annunciation looked unchanged, except that a new altar now faced the twelve rows of pews and the priest would say Mass in Turkish. The marble floor, in large slabs of alternating black and white, was freshly washed, looking as it must have a century earlier. The Mediterranean sun still shone through the rounded windows above the columns that lined the church, near which old women made the Stations of the Cross. Above the old altar, which symbolically faced God rather than the people, were six large baroque golden candelabra. The tabernacle was gold. There were two side altars, neither recessed, the one on the right with a large plaster statue of St Theresa, the one on the left with a similar coloured effigy of St Francis of Assisi holding the child Jesus in one hand. On the right-hand wall of the church at the back was a large frieze of St George, patron not only of England but of most eastern Christians. Above the caption, “Sancte George Ora Pro Nobis,” the saint astride his white charger held a real spear, red tipped with blood, poised to strike the already wounded green dragon, whose teeth were exposed menacingly, like a monster’s in an old horror film, sneering at the horse’s hooves and the spear at his head. This was the religion